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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Integration Pack for HP Operations Manager is an add-on for System Center 2012 SP1 Beta- Orchestrator that enables you to automate the consolidation and correlation of fault and performance events across you entire physical and virtual IT infrastructure...

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...

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...

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...

The IP can be downloaded from download center IP user guide is located on Technet The Integration Pack includes the following activities: Azure Certificates - the Azure Certificates activity is used in a runbook to add, delete, and list management and...

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...

For the last few weeks we’ve been getting intermittent reports from people who could not get past the database configuration step during installation of Service Provider Foundation.  I myself hit this repeatedly during prep work for the recent TAP...

Integration Guide for Orchestrator is now available at: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13185.system-center-2012-integration-guide-orchestrator.aspx

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...

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...

We have created a new TechNet forum for Service Provider Foundation.  Please share your experiences and ask questions in the forums.  Product team members and other experts in the community will participate as well to help get everybody going...

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...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where you get an "Access Denied" in Runbook Designer when connecting to the Orchestrator Management Server. ===== Symptoms When attempting to connect to your System...

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...

System Center 2012 SP1 Beta - Orchestrator Integration Packs extend the core System Center 2012 SP1 beta - Orchestrator component to enable the authoring of datacenter automation using System Center 2012 Components. This download includes Integration...

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where running the Orchestrator "SCOExpressWriter.exe /register" command fails with "Failed to create and register Orchestrator Express Writer" and logs...

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...

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...

Are you looking for a good way to get started learning everything that’s new in Orchestrator 2012 and SCSM? If so then here’s the guide for you: ===== In this post, we're turning to two more components of System Center 2012, Orchestrator and Service Manager...