A few weeks ago, the first public details of the new Service Manager 2012 (formerly known as Service Manager 2012 R2) were released by Microsoft. To get a good overview, I will publish the most important details in this post.

Investments in the existing Features:

• Parallel and Dependent Activities (e.g. for Change Requests)
• Detailed configuration for Incident SLAs
• Better Console Performance
• AD Connector improvements
• New Powershell module for better CLI management
• Bug fixes

Major Investments:

• Service Requests
• Release Management
• New Self Service Portal
• Service Catalog (Web Portal) with Role-based Access
• New Connectors for Orchestrator (Opalis) and Virtual Machine Manager
• Orchestrator-based Activities to trigger runbooks
• New Data Warehouse (SCSM, SCOM, SCCM)
• New and easy ways to create reports and deal with data from the Data Warehouse

Within the next weeks and months, I will post more information about the new version of Service Manager 2012. The product launch will be in Q4 2011, Public Beta will be available in Q3 2011.

regards
Marcel