April, 2011

I’ve had this question so many times lately that I’ve just got to write a blog post about it!  This is the scenario… Create an AD connector Import users (or really any other kind of object – computer, printer, group) via that connector The user account...

This post will discuss our experiences defining and extending the SCSM incident data model and forms used in our SCSM implementation. Our team (MPSD) provides a comprehensive monitoring and management service used by Microsoft.com, TechNet, Windows Update...

Quite a few customers have asked us over the last couple of years if we would localize Service Manager into Arabic.  Since Arabic is what is called a “bi-directional language” there is some significant additional work we would have to do in the infrastructure...

This is a continuation in a series of blog posts on using SMLets Beta 3. Previous blog posts in this series: Using SMLets Beta 3 Post #1 – Using Get-SCSMObject, Get-SCSMClass to Dump Data from SCSM Using SMLets Beta 3 Post #2–Using Get-SCSMEnumeration...

This is a continuation in a series of blog posts on using SMLets Beta 3.  Previous blog posts in this series: Using SMLets Beta 3 Post #1 – Using Get-SCSMObject, Get-SCSMClass to Dump Data from SCSM I was talking to a customer today and they wanted...

Yesterday we released SMLets Beta 3 .  This will be the first in a series of posts on using SMLets Beta 3. To start out with let’s answer a question in the comments on the release announcement blog post from Sam: I also wanted to ask you about the...

Today we released a major new release of SMLets – Beta 3!  Download the new release at the CodePlex site . Jim Truher and I have been hard at work adding a lot of new capabilities, cmdlets, testing harnesses, scripts, cleaning up the code base, and...

Marcel Zehner has created a new Opalis integration pack for SCSM.  So far it includes the following activities: New Features in V1.5: New Activity "Autoclose completed Change Requests" New Icons for better visibility New Activity "Autoclose...

A customer I visited last week had a requirement to show whether or not an affected user was a VIP or not.  Their current system has a little red label next to the users name that indicates whether they are a VIP or not.  My challenge was to...

This is a continuation of the Tasks series of blog posts: Tasks – Part 1: Tasks Overview Tasks - Part 2: Custom Console Tasks for Create, Edit, Delete In this blog post we will look at creating command line console tasks. These are the...

Let’s say you create an incident – it has an ID of IR210: 2 minutes later you create another incident and it has an ID of IR262: You know that there couldn’t possibly have been 51 incidents created in the last 2 minutes because you are the only person...

People sometimes ask why they can’t include some columns in the views that they want.  Here is a common one:  Why can’t I add the affected configuration item(s) as a column in my incident view? In order to understand the answer to this question...

We’ll I am finally starting to get caught up from MMS 2011!  It was great to see many of you there at the conference!  I wish we could have MMS every month (especially if I could just go and not have to present)! I was going to write up a blog...

A new TechNet Gallery site has been set up (in beta for now) to enable people in the community to more easily share solutions with each other. Right now we have just one contribution from Steve Beaumont up there to backup your unsealed MPs, but I’m...

Back in February we hosted a Service Manager Deep Dive Summit where the Program Managers from the product team presented on various topics in depth: Incident and Problem Management – Ketan Ghelani Change Management  - Vladimir Bakhmetyev CMDB &...

Jim Truher and I have been seeing some usage of the SMLets Get-SCSMObject cmdlet lately that will cause really bad performance when run in a production environment. Things will work fine in a dev/test environment where the quantity of data is small but...