Check out the System Center 2012 Guided Hands On Labs!  They are a set of 14 labs that cover how to use System Center to deliver IT as a Service using a Private Cloud.  The demos span across the three pillars of System Center – Application Management...

Service Provider Foundation is a new set of APIs for System Center that will be released in System Center 2012 SP1.   These APIs are designed to enable hosters (or a central enterprise IT organization acting as a hoster for the rest of the organization...

In Customer Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) we introduced a small group of customers and partners to a new and important feature segment being released with Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1: Service Provider Foundation (SPF). The CTP1 release provided enough...

As I write this post flying back from TechEd, North America ( check out Day 1 keynote ), it never ceases to amaze me how technology has really changed our lives!!! Speaking of which, what an honor that all of you voted System Center 2012 as best Microsoft...

I just saw this come through my email and I had to share it, and I admit I’m a little jealous and a little relieved at the same time. You see I have had the idea of writing an extension to Configuration Manager to launch Orchestrator runbooks via the...

One of our friends over on the Office365 team who does a lot of stuff with Orchestrator and PowerShell (and I mean deep stuff), Tim Bertalot, pointed out a cool Visual Studio add-on that lets you visualize the schema of a web service. The tool is called...

Antoni Hanus, a Premier Field Engineer in California, recently wrote a blog article about integrating Orchestrator and Service Manager in a real world customer scenario. Here’s how he puts the scenario: “I was working with a customer this week who had...

I saw this today in an email from PowerShell.com and had to pass it on… seems like PSv3 is going to have lots of little handy additions: Implicit Foreach in PSv3 PowerShell v3 Beta is available for quite some time now, so every now and then we start tossing...

Orchestrator 2012 introduced the capability to define a global Variable as encrypted. This now allowed admins to use variables to store passwords instead of typing them into lots of different places in runbooks. But if the variable is encrypted, how does...

Whoa!  What’s with the new style?!  The System Center engineering team blogs are now part of the Server & Tools blog network which is a select few top tier blogs from the Server and Tools division.  This network is part of a larger...

I got a question posed to me in the form of a design change request for Orchestrator. And, true to fashion for Orchestrator, I pointed out that what was being asked for as a feature could be solved by the existing product by just architecting the runbook...

One of the major pieces of functionality in Orchestrator and in many of the Integration Packs the ability to monitor something (a database, a server) and start a runbook when a certain condition occurs. The monitor activities are used extensively by customers...

Even on the product team, there is a lot of information we don’t see that gets published about the product. Other arms of Microsoft like Customer Support are continually listening to customers and feed bugs and change requests to the product team, but...

I’ve put together a new TechNet Wiki page that is a “one stop shopping” index of the following things: · Forums · Galleries · Libraries (aka “docs”) · Survival Guides · Wikis · Engineering Team Blogs · Microsoft Employee Blogs · Community Blogs · MVP...

When I first started working with Opalis (now Orchestrator) and the SDK, I was taught that you could create activities (and Integration Packs) using the declarative approach or the imperative approach. The way it was relayed, these were two mutually-exclusive...

Ok, I spared you the “SQL Sequel” puns this time, but this article does contain some SQL…In this article, I’m again going to talk about actually removing data, so here goes the big scary warning box: Note from the legal department: The process described...

I just couldn’t resist having a little fun with the title of the article…but today’s topic is a little more serious. In the previous articles, IPs and Activities and How Those are Represented in the Database and SQL Sequel: More Useful Orchestrator Database...

When I was writing the article I posted a few days ago about importing IPs programmatically ( More Fun with COM: Importing Integration Packs via PowerShell ), I had to do a lot of testing to make sure the script was going to actually work and import the...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where attempting to deploy the Integration Pack for .NET that comes with the Orchestrator Orchestration Integration Toolkit, it fails and logs an event ID 10005. ===== Symptoms...

In the last article, I showed how you can run a few SQL queries to find some detailed information about IPs, runbooks and activities and their relationships in the database. In this article, I’ll focus more on running runbooks (Jobs). To start with, here...

Following some of my recent articles about how Integration Packs (IPs) are handled during registration, installation, and unregistration (see Understanding IP Installation: What Does Register/Unregister/Deploy/Undeploy Really Mean? ), and as a precursor...

If you're like me, you like to put descriptive text in a link to describe what it does. Perhaps it's to indicate the conditions of a branching structure, like this: But what’s annoying is that when you turn on the Link text, every link has the word “Link...

One of our most awesome test guys on the Orchestrator Team, Zhenhua Yao, who has delivered such goodies as the TFS IP and a PowerShell IP on our CodePlex site , has done it again! Anyone who has built an IP using the Orchestrator SDK knows that you need...

Around the office, we have more and more internal teams that are latching on to Orchestrator and wanting to use it for building all sorts of integrations and automations, but one of the things that comes up from time to time is how to get the ability...

One of the most foundational activities an Orchestrator admin does is installing Integration Packs. After all, Integration Packs provide the real value to Orchestrator because they allow you to extend its capabilities and let you connect to virtually...