Browse by Tags

To answer a question I've been getting a lot lately: yes, Service Provider Foundation (SPF) is still a part of System Center 2012 SP1. The reason the question is coming up so much is that SPF moved in terms of packaging. Up to and including the CTP2 release ...read more

The Integration Pack for VMware vSphere is an add-on for System Center 2012 SP1 Beta- Orchestrator that enables you to connect System Center Orchestrator to your VMware vSphere server to automate actions in VMware vSphere to enable full management of ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one explains how to fix an issue where Orchestrator Integration Pack for Netcool/OMNIbus activities return the error "java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid ObjectServer data type". ===== Symptoms ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published today. This one tells you how to determine the version of System Center Orchestrator and its components that you’re running. ===== Summary This article describes how to determine your current System Center ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where the Orchestrator Run Program activity returns a "Process creation failed" "The system cannot find the file specified" error. ===== Symptoms Executing ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where running the Orchestrator "SCOExpressWriter.exe /register" command fails with "Failed to create and register Orchestrator Express Writer" and logs ...read more

Orchestrator 2012 introduced the capability to define a global Variable as encrypted. This now allowed admins to use variables to store passwords instead of typing them into lots of different places in runbooks. But if the variable is encrypted, how does ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we published. This one talks about an issue where attempting to deploy the Integration Pack for .NET that comes with the Orchestrator Orchestration Integration Toolkit, it fails and logs an event ID 10005. ===== Symptoms ...read more

Here’s a new Knowledge Base article we recently published. This one discusses an issue where one or more activities are displayed as "unknown" when viewing a Runbook in the System Center 2012 Orchestrator Runbook Designer. ===== Symptoms When ...read more

One of our favorite community members, Ryan Andorfer, has updated his community IP for Configuration Manager 2007 to work with Orchestrator, and I thought I’d highlight this IP for everyone. You may know Ryan from his previous IP’s (available on CodePlex ...read more

One of the common parameter types in PowerShell is the switch parameter. It’s basically a Boolean (true/false) type of parameter, and you either add it to the command line or not. Here’s an example: get-scoevents get-scoevents –formatXML The above command ...read more

Using the Orchestrator Integration Toolkit’s Command-Line Activity Wizard, you can create your own custom activities really easily just by using a simple command line or one-line PowerShell script. When creating activities, you can specify parameters ...read more

There are times when you want to validate that the value of a property isn’t blank. For example, you could be checking the output value (published data) of an activity to make sure it’s not blank before proceeding. However, in the list of available comparisons ...read more

Before I start, here are links to the previous parts of this series: Getting Deeper Information from Orchestrator via COM Getting Deeper Information from orchestrator via COM, part 2 In the last two posts, I showed how to connect to the COM interface ...read more

In the last post , I showed you how to use PowerShell to connect to the Orchestrator COM interface for getting (and setting) various types of information. Now I’m going to run through a quick demo of how to get things like global resources (variables ...read more

I see a lot of requests from people creating integrations with Orchestrator to get information about some of the inner workings of an installation, beyond what’s available via the web service. The web service allows you to retrieve information about: ...read more

One of the threads I’ve seen going around the Orchestrator discussion list recently is how to run the Runbook Tester as another user. The Runbook Tester is launched from the Runbook Designer and automatically loads the runbook currently being edited. ...read more

One of the cool things about Orchestrator is that it can automatically handle multiple-instance threading of runbooks or queue them up depending on your need. For instance, you may have a runbook that processes new users to be added to Active Directory ...read more

A couple of weeks ago, Karl Prosser posted an interesting article on using PowerShell v3 with Orchestrator .And, while at MMS last week, I had an opportunity to sit down and run through one of the PowerShell v3 hands-on labs that were available. In that ...read more

Using the “Initialize Data” activity at the beginning of a runbook allows you to provide input parameters to any runbook. This greatly enhances the flexibility of a runbook by allowing it to be called by another runbook or via the web service, and the ...read more

I recently saw a new feature suggestion in the Orchestrator feedback on Connect and I realized that we can actually accomplish the requested functionality today in Orchestrator, so I thought I’d share how. Here is the feedback from the customer: There ...read more

One of the features in Orchestrator is “Variables”. These are globally-available, statically-defined values (hence the running joke that they’re not actually “variables”, they’re “constants”). They provide a good way to define values that you re-use over ...read more

While at MMS last week, it was apparent that many people were still finding out about Orchestrator. One of the most common comments I heard was something like “I really think Orchestrator is cool, but I already have a Service Manager-like tool in place ...read more

In the last post , I showed how to create a configuration for an activity that shows up in the options menu. I also showed how you can use that configuration setting to modify the actions of the activity at runtime. In this post, I’ll show you how to ...read more

I was looking through the new articles over on our TechNet Wiki and came across this one that I thought you might find helpful. This one was written by Microsoft’s own Anil Erduran and in it he talks about Smart Links and link conditions in System Center ...read more