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...

Patrik Sundqvist , a Solution Architect at our partner ATEA Spintop , has put together a great example of using the SDK by extending the new user provisioning solution I provided earlier with a web interface. Having a web interface to automated solutions...

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...

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...

I don't know what else to call this since this has never happened before but the “Update to Update Rollup 3” is now available. A couple of weeks ago we noticed that there was an incorrect binary version in the Update Rollup 3 package which...

I know that troubleshooting the data warehouse can be a bit intimidating. Sometimes even figuring out where to begin to look can be difficult. In this series of blog posts, I am going to help you figure out how to troubleshoot the data warehouse. I’ll...

This post is a continuation in the series which describes the System Center common platform components implemented in Service Manager. Previous posts: The System Center Platform in Service Manager Part 1: Introduction The System Center Platform...

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Beta - Installable Bits (if you want to do that instead of VMs) http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34607 App Controller – Service Pack 1 Beta http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download...

I spent several hours today trying to set up load balancing for my test lab today.   It was a total pain because we have no documentation on how to do this and the information out there on the web is all over the place on this topic.  It...

What is Grooming? Why Groom? The ServiceManager database is the “online” or “operational” database in Service Manager. It is the database which most users are interacting with when they are using Service Manager. Therefore,...

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...

The Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) participants have had access to some additional training/ramp up materials to help them get started as quickly as possible.  The RDP allowed customers and partners met 1x /week for 10 weeks and covered a bunch of...

This is a really common question that comes from customers switching from other service desk applications to System Center - Service Manager (SCSM).  They are used to a user experience for selecting a classification from a series of drop down controls...

Heads up!  A new System Center 2012 – Service Manager book has been authored by some of our MVPs and other SCSM experts: * Sam Erskine * Andreas Baumgarten * Dieter Gasser * Anders Asp * Steve Beaumont     This is the first 2012-generation...

This was another adrenaline filled week. A great TechEd 2012 in Orlando (see the keynote here) followed by System Center 2012 winning the best product award (thanks to all of you, we are humbled) and lastly being able to share the exciting new features...

When introducing Incident Management with System Center Service Manager into an organization, customers often want to extend the out of box functionality of Incidents. A common extension is to add some additional information to be tracked with incidents...

One of the things that people often ask about is how to use the Service Manager SDK to: create new objects, update objects, add relationships, remove relationships One of the keys to using the SDK...

This video walks through a sample extension and customization scenario for Service Manager. Specifically, we extend the Change Management process with a new type of Change Request and add automated activities to these CRs. To implement this new process...

We’ve recently been making some announcements about the Application Approval Workflow (AAW) Solution Accelerator.  Demo . One of the first conclusions people come to regarding this solution accelerator is: “This solution accelerator requires the...

Update: 11/19/2011 - Please note: For now this solution has only been tested with Orchestrator Beta . More info will come soon on when SCO RC will be supported. Update 11/22/2011 – Important ! The Cloud Service Process Pack will not be upgradeable...

I always intended to post the complete Service Manager Visio Architecture Diagram at the completion of the Service Manager platform blog series, but I never actually got around to it. Here’s the series if you haven’t had a chance to read...

Jim Pitts and I presented a session at Tech Ed Europe 2010 last week on how to use Service Manager and Opalis together to automate the process of provisioning VMs.  The session was the #4 rated session for the entire event last time I checked. ...

I was checking out what was new over in our TechNet Wiki and came across a System Center 2012 Service Manager Survival Guide that was recently published by a Microsoft employee.  It’s essentially a page that acts as a pointer to the best SCSM information...

Here’s one trick you can use to build command line for installing SM components silently (e.g. for install them with some script file). First of all if you execute command “ setup.exe /?” command line parameters will be shown (see screenshot below...

Modeling in the System Center common platform involves defining new classes, properties on those classes, and relationships between those classes. In a previous post , I showed you how to define a new derived class in a management pack to extend the Service...