One of our favorite community members, Ryan Andorfer, has updated his community IP for Configuration Manager 2007 to work with Orchestrator, and I thought I’d highlight this IP for everyone. You may know Ryan from his previous IP’s (available on CodePlex...

One of the common parameter types in PowerShell is the switch parameter. It’s basically a Boolean (true/false) type of parameter, and you either add it to the command line or not. Here’s an example: get-scoevents get-scoevents –formatXML The above command...

After slogging through configuring the SCSM web interfaces for load balancing I thought I would try to get it going with Orchestrator.  It was fortunately much easier this time since I knew what to look for and experiment with.  You should probably...

Using the Orchestrator Integration Toolkit’s Command-Line Activity Wizard, you can create your own custom activities really easily just by using a simple command line or one-line PowerShell script. When creating activities, you can specify parameters...

There are times when you want to validate that the value of a property isn’t blank. For example, you could be checking the output value (published data) of an activity to make sure it’s not blank before proceeding. However, in the list of available comparisons...

Before I start, here are links to the previous parts of this series: Getting Deeper Information from Orchestrator via COM Getting Deeper Information from orchestrator via COM, part 2 In the last two posts, I showed how to connect to the COM interface...

In the last post , I showed you how to use PowerShell to connect to the Orchestrator COM interface for getting (and setting) various types of information. Now I’m going to run through a quick demo of how to get things like global resources (variables...

I see a lot of requests from people creating integrations with Orchestrator to get information about some of the inner workings of an installation, beyond what’s available via the web service. The web service allows you to retrieve information about:...

One of the threads I’ve seen going around the Orchestrator discussion list recently is how to run the Runbook Tester as another user. The Runbook Tester is launched from the Runbook Designer and automatically loads the runbook currently being edited....

One of the cool things about Orchestrator is that it can automatically handle multiple-instance threading of runbooks or queue them up depending on your need. For instance, you may have a runbook that processes new users to be added to Active Directory...

A couple of weeks ago, Karl Prosser posted an interesting article on using PowerShell v3 with Orchestrator .And, while at MMS last week, I had an opportunity to sit down and run through one of the PowerShell v3 hands-on labs that were available. In that...

Using the “Initialize Data” activity at the beginning of a runbook allows you to provide input parameters to any runbook. This greatly enhances the flexibility of a runbook by allowing it to be called by another runbook or via the web service, and the...

I recently saw a new feature suggestion in the Orchestrator feedback on Connect and I realized that we can actually accomplish the requested functionality today in Orchestrator, so I thought I’d share how. Here is the feedback from the customer: There...

One of the features in Orchestrator is “Variables”. These are globally-available, statically-defined values (hence the running joke that they’re not actually “variables”, they’re “constants”). They provide a good way to define values that you re-use over...

While at MMS last week, it was apparent that many people were still finding out about Orchestrator. One of the most common comments I heard was something like “I really think Orchestrator is cool, but I already have a Service Manager-like tool in place...

In the last post , I showed how to create a configuration for an activity that shows up in the options menu. I also showed how you can use that configuration setting to modify the actions of the activity at runtime. In this post, I’ll show you how to...

Yesterday, I wrote about how to debug a custom activity using Visual Studio . Today I’m going to show you how to add an item to the Options Menu so that you can have a reusable configuration setting that can be used across multiple activities in an IP...

One of the first questions people have when they start writing custom Orchestrator activities using the SDK is “How do I step through my code?”. After all, activities are not executables, they’re just classes. And, it’s not until the classes are packaged...

I was looking through the new articles over on our TechNet Wiki and came across this one that I thought you might find helpful. This one was written by Microsoft’s own Anil Erduran and in it he talks about Smart Links and link conditions in System Center...

The Microsoft Management Summit 2012 is only three weeks away!!  We can’t wait to see you all there. We will be running a series of focus groups at MMS to gather feedback from you on current and future versions of System Center. Participating in...

We worked with Kelverion to make sure that our System Center customers who have BMC products will be able to get BMC integration packs that work with System Center 2012- Orchestrator without cost. I’m happy to announce that the BMC IPs RTM are...

Starting a Runbook In Orchestrator a runbook is started by inserting a record in the jobs table in the database. The record contains at minimum the Runbook ID and any input parameters required by the runbook. Optionally, the record may indicate the Runbook...

Here is part 3 of Anil Erduran’s series on RunBooks in Orchestrator 2012. This part walks you through how to test, save and run your existing RunBooks: System Center Orchestrator 2012 – Test & Start RunBooks : http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive...

To enhance datacenter automation options, Orchestrator 2012 exposes a REST OData web service. The web service enables programmatic access to Orchestrator runtime resources like Runbooks, Jobs, and Events, and also enables a user to start Runbooks and...

I was browsing through all of the great new articles over on our TechNet Wiki and came across this one that I thought you might like. It’s written by Microsoft’s own Anil Erduran and it discusses the concept of RunBooks in Orchestrator 2012.  It...