I just noticed that all of these cool demo videos were posted to TechNet Video earlier this month.  Check them out to see how System Center 2012 can make managing your private cloud a whole lot easier and better!   Private Cloud Demo Extravaganza...

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with customers over the last 6-12 months helping them plan out and deploy their first private clouds managed by System Center 2012.  To help people get started faster I headed into the Enterprise Engineering...

Working with relationships in the SCSM integration pack can be a bit tricky so this blog post is intended to provide some tips. First of all it is really important when working with Service Manager to understand the data model.  Have a look at the...

I had someone contact me recently with some confusion about the Read Text Log activity in Orchestrator. It seems that it wasn’t quite working the way they expected and they were left scratching their head. So I put together a quick demo runbook and tested...

Bart Timmermans ( blog , @Bart_Inovativ ) , a consultant at Inovativ, has just released an integration pack for Exchange!  Here is a graphic of the activities included.  You can read more about the integratio pack on his blog or download it...

There are always interesting shortcuts and magical techniques to discover in PowerShell, and “splatting” is one of them. Splatting allows you to bundle a set of parameters into a hashtable and then simply using it as single parameter to a PowerShell function...

This article is a follow-on to my previous post, Cool Tool: New Command Line Utility to Start a Runbook , where I talked about using the web service to quickly start a runbook with named parameters. Now it’s time to put that into action! Orchestrator...

From time to time I get questions from partners and some prolific IP developers who want to create IP’s automatically as part of their build process instead of having to go through the wizard each time. This is especially important when you have a lot...

In the previous Opalis release, we shipped a standard activity called “Send Popup”, which used the Windows messaging system to create a popup on a user’s desktop. We removed that activity because the method we used was incompatible with Windows Server...

I saw a question in the forums around multi-value data and how someone could pass multi-value data in to a runbook via the Initialize Data activity. I was going to answer the question there but thought it would be better to post an article to reach a...

I was talking with one of the other Program Managers on the team the other day about how he wanted to be able to launch a runbook as part of a remediation task in Operations Manager, and how it would be great if he has some command-line utility that would...

Ryan Andorfer, one of our favorite members of the Orchestrator community, has done it again. He has come out with a new utility to help administrators sanitize their runbook export files.Here’s what Ryan has to say: A ‘difficulty’ we have with migrating...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we recently published. This one discusses an issue where one or more activities are displayed as "unknown" when viewing a Runbook in the System Center 2012 Orchestrator Runbook Designer. ===== Symptoms When...

I do lots of PowerShell scripting, both inside runbooks and in stand-alone scripts. I have my own little virtual lab with a bunch of VMs and a domain controller that has a group policy assigned to enable the right PowerShell scripting settings on all...

I saw a question in the forums the other day by a person who asked how you should expect activities in a workflow to be executed when one of the activities generates multi-value data. In other words, one of my activities returns a list of things. How...

          Managing and Operating a Microsoft Private Cloud—How to Apply the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) The Microsoft Operations Framework team is working on a new guide: Managing and Operating a Microsoft Private Cloud...

  Did you get this error message when trying to import the Cloud Service MP runbooks into Orchestrator?   This is because the Cloud Service MP is not actually testing to see if the user that is running the setup actually has the required permissions...

        Enhance private cloud management with new process pack   Microsoft System Center Cloud Services Process Pack now available for download! The Microsoft Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce that the System Center...

If you’re like me, you use the Runbook Tester a lot. And, if you’re like me, you get annoyed by always having to resize the window to maximize one area or another. For me, I use the logging section more than anything, so I want to maximize the size of...

When we on the product team create an integration pack for a product, whether it’s for System Center or another Microsoft products, or even a 3rd-party product, our goal is not to try and replicate everything that product does in the form of runbook activities...

        Enhance your Application Approval Process The Microsoft Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce that the Application Approval Workflow Solution Accelerator is now available for download! · Download...

With Microsoft System Center 2012 Operations Manager connections to other Enterprise Management (EM) tools or Service Desks are now provided via System Center 2012 Orchestrator.  Customers have been asking how to build a suite of Orchestrator Runbooks...

Note from the legal dept: The process described here is not officially supported by Microsoft and are provided only as an example to the community. Neither I nor Microsoft, nor any other person, animal, vegetable or mineral assumes responsibility for...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one talks about an issue where the Orchestrator Runbook Service starts and then stops after 30-60 seconds and logs a 7023 event. ===== Symptoms The Orchestrator Runbook Service (orunbook) on...

I see this question on internal discussions list every now and then, so I thought I'd answer it here to be helpful. The question was: Is there a maximum length for string parameters in the Initialize Data activity? And if the answer is “yes” – what would...