SCSM 2012 Public Beta Released!

I know this is probably old news to all of you already, but I didn’t get a chance to blog it earlier this week when it happened because I was traveling.

SCSM 2012 public beta is now released on the download center!  You can get it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27844

A few important reminders:

• Only TAP customers are supported to use SCSM 2012 Beta in production.
• It will be technically possible to upgrade from SCSM 2012 Beta –> RC –> RTM but only TAP customers are supported doing so.
• CTP2 (TAP only build) is upgradeable to Beta

What’s new in SCSM 2012?

Key Features in SCSM2012

• New Self-Service Portal based on SharePoint 2010
• Service Catalog
• Service Requests
• Connector to VMM 2012
• Connector to Orchestrator
• Service Level Agreement support for Incidents and Service Requests
• Release Management with parallel activity support
• Enterprise Data Warehouse with BI Analytics (OLAP)
• Periodic query workflow and notification support
• More PowerShell administrative cmdlets
• Updated connectors to support SC 2012
• Parent – child support for incident and release management
• Authoring tool support for customer customizations.
• Performance improvements above SCSM2010 SP1 with larger datasets – details to come later after testing is complete
• Bug fixes for all areas including UX and customer / partner reported issues

The 2012 version of the GRC management pack and the management pack code named “Andes” will be available soon.

As the pre-RTM versions of each of the System Center products are releasing on slightly different schedules right now figuring out which version of each product can be connected to which version of SCSM can be a little tricky.  Use this table as a guide:

** The SCOM CI connector will not work with SCOM RC due to a MP version mismatch on some of the system library MPs.  If you need to get SCSM Beta working with SCOM RC please escalate through your Microsoft account team to Travis Wright.  We have a manual procedure which can be followed in a lab/test environment to get this connector working.

As you can see there will be a new version of the Exchange connector. The Exchange connector 1.0 and 2.0 will not work with SCSM 2012. I will provide a new version of the Exchange connector - 3.0 Beta - in the first part of November that will work with SCSM 2012 Beta. The same is true of the Send Email solution that comes with the Exchange connector. The 3.0 version of the connector will support service requests and other work item types among some other new features and of course bug fixes. Since I am sure someone will ask… at this point it looks like the Exchange connector will continue to be an out of band solution that is not officially supported by Microsoft.  We continue to evaluate ways that we can get it to a supported level.

At the same time that SCSM 2012 beta was released a couple of other releases happened :

• App Controller beta: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27843
• Orchestrator RC: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27842

Read the release announcement on the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/10/27/announcing-new-system-center-2012-pre-releases-delivering-self-service-application-management-with-the-microsoft-private-cloud.aspx 

Some people have already started blogging about SCSM 2012 – here are some examples:

http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/10/27/news-in-scsm12-beta-1-service-level-objectives-slo/

http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/10/28/news-in-scsm12-beta-2-service-requests/

http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/10/28/news-in-scsm12-beta-3-automation-of-service-requests/

http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/10/29/news-in-scsm12-beta-4-enable-self-service-for-service-requests/

http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/10/30/news-in-scsm12-beta-5-parentchild-incidents/

Please join the Connect site for SCSM 2012 and provide us feedback!

http://connect.microsoft.com/directory/?keywords=Service+Manager