To support your company and your processes even better, SM12 now offers Release Management. Often to release a new build of a Software you have a corresponding Change Request. Therefore SM12 also offers a new activity called “Dependent Activity” that allows you to connect Change Requests with Release Records. Let’s see how this works.

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The complete SCSM SM12 (Beta) Series:
#1 – Service Level Objectives (SLO)
#2 – Service Requests
#3 – Automation of Service Requests
#4 – Enable Self-Service for Service Requests
#5 – Parent/Child Incidents
#6 – Release Management
#7 – Connectors
#8 – Permissions for triggering System Center Orchestrator runbooks
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First let’s take a look at the new Configuration Items that you need for Release Management. You can now manage “Builds” which represents a Version/Build of a specific Software, Program, Operating System Image etc. Then you have “Environments” that allows you to manage your Prod, Pre-Prod-, Test-, Disaster- or whatever Environment. This is needed to make sure you know what build is used in which environment. In this example I created a single build for an Operating System Image.

Now let’s take a look at the environments.

If we have this ready we can create a first Release Record. This should represent the release of this new Operating System Image in the production environment. Change to the Work Items Area, mark Release Management and click on the appropriate task.

Select a template. In a real-world scenario it makes sense to create Release Record Template for the different kind of releases you are managing. Here, I just select the Default Template.

Now fill in the needed values for the new Release.

On the “Release Package” add the related CIs. In this example I add the build, the environment and the related Server. This way you can later track any releases in very detail.

Now it’s time for detailled planning.

On the “Activities” tab you can plan the different steps for the release. When using templates you can preconfigure the needed activities.

Last fill in some information about the release or installation process. Then close the form.

After the release is complete, you can check the related items of the different CIs.

Now normally a Release is part of a Change Request. Means, a Change Manager create a Change Request that contains multiple Activities. One of those Activities could descibe the Release of a new software build/version to an environment. This is where you can now connect your Release Record.

Here’s an example of a Change Request. One Step would be releasing the new build. For this, a dependent activity can be used. As you can see, those kind of activities have a “linked to” attribute which is empty because there’s no “connected” Release Record.

Now let’s create a new Release Record and link one of the activities to the existing Change Request. Just add a new Manual Activity to the Release Record, right-klick the activity and choose the appropriate option.

Now select the Change Request that you want to link the Release Activity to and the contained dependent activity in it.

One more thing you can do is linking multiple Release Records together. For that, create a new Release Record, mark it as Parent Release Record and link multiple Child Release Records to it.

That’s it. Now have fun managing your releases with the new SM12 Release Management feature.

regards
Marcel