Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) – Part 3: Creating Views by using Snippet Templates

Posted on 09/01/2013 by Marcel Zehner

VSAE offers multiple options to create views. You could use the View template or an empty Management Pack Fragment template. For this example however, I decided to use a snippet template to demonstrate how this can be used to create your own templates for your needs. It is indeed very powerful and can save you lots of time for repetitive tasks.

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Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) – Part 2: Creating a Folder with a custom Image

Posted on 04/01/2013 by Marcel Zehner

In part 2 of this VSAE series I will demonstrate how to create folders with custom images to the Management Pack to have a container ready for creating views later on. Make sure you take a look at the other parts too as I will not go into some details again.

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Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) – Part 1: Creating a new CI Class

Posted on 03/01/2013 by Marcel Zehner

I decided to do a VSAE series that explains how to use the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions to extend and customize Service Manager. This is indeed an excellent extension when Visual Studio is your Service Manager authoring tool! If it’s not, it’s definitely worth looking at it, and the System Center VSAE help you being successful.

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SCSM 2012 SP1 – Installation

Posted on 27/12/2012 by Marcel Zehner

Before you can enjoy the new features of SP1 you indeed need to install it. But I bet you already knew that Smiley In this article I will give you a quick overview of the installation process and the preparation steps. I will probably add some more information to this post later with some real-world experience – at the time of writing this is limited to my two lab and demo environments. Also, if YOU have other suggestions or want to report YOUR experience with SP1, feel free to comment. I will then upgrade the post with that additional information to make it even more valuable for other readers.

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System Center Service Pack 1 released

Posted on 25/12/2012 by Marcel Zehner

It’s finally here on MSDN/Technet, and in a few days also downloadable for everyone: System Center 2012 Service Pack 1! We had to wait a long time for it and are now happy to see some new functionality and also important bug fixes available for Service Manager 2012.  This is what you can expect from SP1 for Service Manager:

  • Support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
  • Support for SQL Server 2012 (all editions)
  • Operations Manager Integration – the SCOM Agent is finally part of SP1 –> I already posted that for Beta
  • Chargeback (Price Sheets for clouds, extended OLAP Cube, Sample Pivot Report)
  • Important bug fixes

To get a full SP1 overview of all new features for System Center products, take a look at this post. I will create some posts about the new Service Manager features in the next days/weeks, so stay tuned!

Cheers
Marcel

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All My Active Work Items – a great solution

Posted on 24/12/2012 by Marcel Zehner

When you support multiple ITIL Processes with Service Manager, your Analysts may complain that they have to constantly navigate in the console to see the objects they are responsible for or they have to work with. This is indeed a pain and the result could be that analysts are missing important Work Items and Requests can not be fulfilled within the defined time frames. The answer for that problem is to have a single view that shows all your active Work Items and gives you good control to manage them.

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Knowledge Articles – or “how end users will find the help articles they are looking for”

Posted on 15/11/2012 by Marcel Zehner

The Service Manager portal offers a possibility to publish Knowledge Articles to consumers. This is a great thing, especially when articles are “connected” to Service Offerings or Request Offerings so that they are available at the correct place. But for articles that are not linked to offerings, e.g. articles that are used by consumers to help themselves to resolve issues, it can be very hard to find the correct articles. There is a search box that allows to find articles quickly, but when the wrong key/search words are used, the result list may be empty. Read on to see another approach of structuring knowledge articles on the portal.

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Marcel@Microsoft Community Open Day in Munich/GER

Posted on 05/11/2012 by Marcel Zehner

Next Friday and Saturday I will attend the Microsoft Community Open Day in Munich-Germany. I’m pretty sure that this will be two very interesting days where we have lots of possibilities to meet MVPs, geeks and other community members. I will travel together with Virtual Machine MVP Thomas Maurer. If you are ready for a live chat with some beers, drop me a message Smiley Looking forward to meet you in person!

Cheers
Marcel

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The Case of the lost Report Data Sources

Posted on 03/11/2012 by Marcel Zehner

Maybe you had this one before: after doing a fresh install of Service Manager or even after SCSM Reporting was already up and running, some or all of the reports lost the connection to their data source. Because I had this issue again this week, I decided to write a blog post on how to solve this.

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Speaker@Microsoft TechDays 2012

Posted on 20/10/2012 by Marcel Zehner

Another year where I was invited by Microsoft to have a speech at TechDays 2012 Switzerland. This time it will be a session about IT Service Management together with my colleague and Virtualization specialist Philipp Witschi from itnetx. We will demonstrate the provisioning of new Services in SCVMM12, the monitoring of the Service with SCOM12 and the Management of it with SCSM12. This will definitely be a great session, so if you have time make sure you join us!

itnetx System Center specialists like MVP Thomas Maurer (@thomasmaurer), Stefan Roth (@scomfaq) and others will also be on site. We have plenty of time during the day, so if you’d like to have a live chat, let us know or just catch us at the event.

Go visit the TechDays 2012 web site for more details.

Cheers
Marcel

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