Introduction Most of our ISV Partners will need to provide some custom administration settings to allow their customers to configure the partners' solutions. For example, you may want to store a server name and database name to connect to as part of...

Every now and then customers and partners ask for Service Manager Visio templates. Awhile back someone on the Operations Manager team put together some templates that I’ve modified a bit for use in Service Manager documentation. Feel free to modify these...

The following are some useful database queries and in a way a tour of the Service Manager database. Sometimes it's just easier to query a database to get the information you need. Please use this information in a "read only" way. Don't attempt to update...

One of the most important common ways partners and customers will extend Service Manager is to create custom connectors to get data into the system. There are many ways of doing this and we will catalog all of them at this blog post . The post and...

As we’ve blogged about in the past, management pack can take a dependency on each other. To do this, you need to add a Reference element in the Manifest section of the management pack. When a management pack (MP ‘A’) takes a references another management...

I get this question so often it deserves a blog entry of its own. First, let’s get a common definition of what is meant by “ multitenancy ” or “ managed service provider ”. Typically this question refers to a managed service...

This question comes up quite often – “How do I get additional AD properties into the Service Manager CMDB?” Like this , or this , or this . These properties might be either properties which exist in AD that we don’t sync in by default with the out of...

I’ve been doing a lot of troubleshooting of Workflows in Service Manager lately as I have been working on some of these extension projects.  It’s not exactly trivial to figure out what is going wrong with a workflow, so I wanted to write a blog post...

Ever wish you could just start over? :) I’ve been using this PowerShell script that Jim Truher (PM on the Service Manager product team) wrote so much lately that I think it is essential to any Service Manager veteran’s toolkit and so I want to increase...

Kurt Van Hoecke has written up an excellent series of blog posts on the Belgium System Center User Group blog on all the connectors that are provided out of the box in Service Manager. Part 1: Importing data into SCSM (part 1) – the SCSM AD &...

System Center Service Manage can be fundamentally broken down into two parts: The platform . The solutions. The platform includes all the infrastructure services such as the workflow engine , the model-based database , the data warehouse...

I’ve had people ask me many times over the last couple of years…. does Service Manager integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager? Can Service Manager help us manage our virtual assets? The answer is… Yes! Although we don’t...

There are couple important contributions from our users I wanted highlight There were quite a few requests to Notify additional recipients (e.g. Affected User / Primary Owner) on the assignment changes. Andrew France has written the MP that does...

This question came up on the forum recently, so I thought I would blog about it so it got a little more visibility.  This should be a pretty common thing people need to set up. Here is the original question: =============== Hi, I have noticed the...

Check out this interview with Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President or the Management and Services Division at Microsoft. In it he talks about what the Opalis acquisition by Microsoft means for System Center Service Manager. We are still digesting this...

A key measurement of incident management is customer satisfaction. Typically customer satisfaction is measured using a survey which captures the customer’s satisfaction with the timeliness of the resolution, the resolution itself, and the attitude of...

Many systems in an IT organization are under management by various management systems - Operations Manager, custom scripts, products that compete with System Center, etc. They all need to have a way to get incidents into the central incident management...

Here is the video capture of the demonstration that Kenon Owens did at TechEd EMEA demonstrating how you can use System Center Service Manager, Operations Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager together to manage a line of business application. In this...

Here is the video capture of the compliance and risk MP announcement we made at TechEd EMEA including Clare Henry demonstrating the MP in action. TechEd Europe 2009 – Service Manager

The Service Manager team is happy to announce that we have released an update to the Beta 2 called aptly ‘Beta 2 Update’. It is available to all of our public Beta customers on the Connect site. This build contains some important fixes we have done recently...

This is a guest blog post from one of our System Center MVPs – Maarten Goet- from the Netherlands. Maarten is a Managing Consultant at INOVATIV, the System Center specialists . He blogs on Techlog and SystemCenterCentral and is a regular speaker at Teched...

At TechEd EMEA we announced the development of a new process management pack for System Center Service Manager for compliance and risk management. Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of the first beta of that management pack for download...

The objective of Problem Management is to resolve the underlying root cause of incidents and consequently prevent incidents from recurring [ITIL]. Proactive Problem Management aims to identifying and solving Problems and Known Errors before the incidents...

This post is the second in the series of implementing a sample helpdesk scenario in Service Manager. Please refer to this earlier post for details on configuring Incident Management Implementing Sample Helpdesk Scenario in Incident Management -...

My earlier post provides a high level overview of Incident Management in Service Manager . I also recommend reading on MOF and ITIL procesess. The best way to learn about Incident Management in Service Manager is going through a real life scenario...