December, 2010

Hello Service Manager fans, After a very successful launch of System Center Service Manager 2010 last April, Microsoft is pleased to announce the release of Service Pack 1, which is available NOW on Microsoft.com/Downloads. System Center Service Manager...

Awhile back I started a series of blog posts on explaining tasks – check out the first post which was an overview of tasks: http://blogs.technet.com/servicemanager/archive/2010/02/11/tasks-part-1-tasks-overview.aspx In this blog post, I’ll...

The security matrix for SCSM allows for users in a Advanced Operator, Author, or Administrator user role to create & edit announcements. Only problem is that the Announcement view out of the box is only in the Administration workspace which only admins...

This one comes up pretty often – a customer creates a new incident view and uses the Incident (advanced) combination class (aka “type projection) as the target for the view. Then the performance of the view is really slow. This blog post will...

In some cases if you have a lot of workflows running, or workflows which run very frequently, or if the workflows have a lot of output the JobStatus and WindowsWorkflowTaskJobStatus tables can get pretty large.  Some customers are reporting sizes...

Setting up outbound email notifications from SCSM can be a bit tricky and sometimes customers have trouble with it.  In this blog post I’ll show you a way that you can test trying to send an email via the SMTP server.  First – I’ll assume that...

Let’s say you want to send a notification to a group of users every time a reviewer votes on a review activity.  How would you configure that?  Well – first of all you’ll need to use the NotEqual critera – see this blog post – to trigger the...

One of our partners, PowerWF, has developed a really powerful workflow authoring tool for automating IT processes.  The way I describe PowerWF is that it helps break down the walls of interoperability between PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation...

You can import MPs using the PowerShell cmdlet Import-SCSMManagementPack.  That works for .xml, .mp, or .mpb files.  But what if you wanted to do it programmatically using the SDK?  No problem.  You just need to know how to do it....

Awhile back I made a post about setting the time zone property and local settings for users using CSV since those cannot be populated from AD automatically and are crucial to making sure email notifications are formatted properly.  Check out that...

Jim Pitts has put together a blog post over on the Opalis blog about how to upload and attach files and knowledge articles to objects in Service Manager using the new Opalis integration page for SCSM. http://blogs.technet.com/b/opalis/archive/2010/12...

Just a quick heads up on a new Service Manager 2010 Knowledge Base article we published today.  If you ever see errors such as An error occurred while loading the items" while working in the Service Manager console then you'll want to keep this...

This video will show you how to use the keyboard to quickly fill out forms without using the mouse.  Service Manager provides a couple of custom form controls designed to make data entry faster and easier: 1) the User Picker control and 2) the List...

A few customer have asked me how they can escalate incidents based on the time elapsed since the incident was opened if it is still active.  The typical requirement is something like this: If the incident has been opened for more than 2 hours and...

If you are not already familiar with modeling concepts please see this blog post first: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2010/04/05/modeling-in-system-center-service-manager.aspx   When you define a property on a class you need to...

When you create a custom form you may want to have code behind to evaluate the user’s data entry based on some business logic before the object is created/updated.  To demonstrate how to do this I have extended the Service Request CodePlex project...