May, 2011

We are in the final stages of copy edit for the System Center Service Manager 2010 Unleashed book now.  It’s up on Amazon now available for pre-order.  The release date on Amazon says something like October 2, but I’m pretty sure it will be...

We released SCSM 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 2 (CU2) earlier this week.  This cumulative update is a rollup of fixes for System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1. It supersedes SP1 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) and contains a superset of the fixes that...

The self-service portal right now always displays datetime values in GMT since we don’t have a way to know which time zone the requesting user is in.  We try to make it clear that the datetime is in GMT time zone like this: Unfortunately, I think...

Cleber Marques, a consultant working for Microsoft, put together this handy guide to all the System Center sessions from TechEd US that just happened this week.  Thanks Cleber! I’ve highlighted the best sessions.  I’m sure it is purely coincidence...

Today we hit an important milestone for SCSM 2012 – CTP1 has been released to TAP customers and partners.  While this is not a public release it is an important milestone that will begin the external testing and feedback cycle.  This milestone...

The self-service portal is built as an ASP.Net web site that runs as an application in Internet Information Services (IIS).  This web site uses what is called an “app pool” (short for application pool) to run.  You can have many applications...

Here is a common complaint that I hear from customers….  When an activity fails in a change request such as manual activity status changing to failed or when a review activity is rejected the change request status as a whole will change to Failed...

Sometimes you just want to delete an object in the UI. That’s easy to do with a console task that uses SMLets. Here’s how: First, go to the Library/Tasks view. Click Create Task. Give the task a name, description (optionally), choose...

One of our partners – Link Development – has recently released some new solutions for SCSM I’m excited to tell you about! Arabic Self-service Portal First they have created an Arabic version of the self-service portal.  This is different than the...

Let’s say you are doing some fancy stuff like manually crafting some notifications like this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/servicemanager/archive/2009/12/15/custom-notification-workflow-on-incident-assignement-or-re-assignment.aspx   …and you...

Today I needed to generate a bunch of test data in a hurry.  How about using SMLets for that!?   No problem!  In fact that is part of why we created SMLets was to do data generation for tests quickly and easily. Here is an example of how...

For whatever reason the notification template wizard doesn’t allow you to insert the GUID ID of an object into the notification template.  You can insert some of the other “generic” properties like Last modified, Time added, and Display name though...

Provance, the partner that brought you IT asset lifecycle management for SCSM, has now produced another solution – the Provance Data Management Pack. This solution is great for importing data from external systems into Service Manager. Here is the...

Customer asks how to get the owner of a service using SMLets on this forum thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/systemcenterservicemanager/thread/c146d523-3c71-40e4-8617-c20de8bd4ba0 No problem!  This is really just a variation...

Marcel Zehner just informed me this morning that he has released version 2.0 of his CodePlex project for Opalis Integration Pack for SCSM.  Congrats Marcel and thanks for sharing this with the community! Here is the list of activities that the integration...

There a a few different ways to get management pack elements using the SDK. For this example, I’ll work with object templates, but the same pattern holds true for essentially all other management pack elements like classes, relationship types, rules...

Authorization is required to manipulate objects such as queues and work items in Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010. These authorizations are managed by using profiles. A profile is a collection of items that are used for authorization. For...

Customer asks – how can I get a list of services using the SDK? Easy – less than 10 lines of code. Here is a simple console application to demonstrate. First create a new application (or use an application you already have going) and...

A few weeks back I announced the System Center Blog Aggregator app for Windows Phone 7 and today I wanted to let you know that it was now available for all you Android users out there as well.  I won’t go into all the details as you can read that...

I know this isn’t Service Manager specific but I thought you might want to know about a great training opportunity we have coming up at the end of the month for Office 365.  On May 24th through 26th Microsoft Learning is hosting a free 3-day Jump...