GitHub Source Control for your Azure Automation Runbooks

Posted on 14/05/2016 by Marcel Zehner

If you work with Automation you might know that you will only be successful when following crystal clear developlent guidelines and processes. One important factor to keep in mind – especially in larger projects with many involved automation engineers – is source control. Azure Automation helps you out here by allowing to connect runbooks to a source control platform. Today, only GitHub can be used, Visual Studio Online will follow soon. This article guides you through the setup process.

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Posted in Azure, DevOps | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Microsoft Regional Director for Switzerland!

Posted on 02/03/2016 by Marcel Zehner

What a day! Today I was informed that I was nominated as a Microsoft Regional Director for Switzerland, starting in April 2016 for the next 2 years!

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Speaking at SCU Malaysia 2016 and SCU Australia 2016

Posted on 16/02/2016 by Marcel Zehner

I admit it: I love community conferences and two of the best of them will run in March 2016 in Malaysia and Australia. Both conferences focus on the latest Microsoft products and solutions and will cover technical and strategic topics around System Center, Azure, OMS, EMS and more. And what I like best: I am able to present at both of them!

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Control personalized views in SCSM

Posted on 20/12/2015 by Marcel Zehner

In SCSM Analysts have the option to change views for their specific needs. They can change the width of columns, hide columns completely or use grouping and sorting functions. All view personalizations are stored in the SCSM database so that users get their settings everytime they connect to SCSM, no matter from what device or console. From time to time there might be a need to reset these personalizations and set the views back to the original state. This blog post explains how this works.

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Operations Management Suite (OMS) – Alerting Part 1 (preview)

Posted on 07/12/2015 by Marcel Zehner

You might have heard of OMS already, Microsoft’s IT Management as a Service approach that delivers different capabilities from the cloud. Some days ago a new feature made it to the public preview status: Alerting! This means that OMS now allows to search for specific events and create alerts if needed. In this post I will quickly go through the new feature and show how it can be used.

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System Center Universe Europe – This was SCU Europe 2015!

Posted on 30/10/2015 by Marcel Zehner

I finally found some time for a recap of our annual community conference System Center Universe Europe. To sum it up: it was again a great success, the feedback was very positive and we will be back next year for sure! Here are some quick facts:

  • The conference was run by itnetX in Basel-Switzerland
  • 420 people from 20 different countries
  • 19 sponsors (thank you!)
  • 62 breakout sessions
  • 8 early morning discussions
  • Multiple parties for fun and networking

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  • Check out the SCU Europe Facebook page for more pictures and please like us! > Facebook
  • Check out our vimeo channel with the session recordings (90% of the sessions have been recorded) > Vimeo

Too bad it’s already over! But you know what? We are already working on the 2016 conference! For next year we have some big news: one is that we will move SCU Europe to Berlin-Germany! The conference will run August 24-26 2016 in the Berlin Congress Center, make sure you save the date now! Details will be announced by the beginning of 2016.

Thanks to all sponsors that make this event possible with their support! Thanks to all our rockstar speakers and experts for delivering awesome content! Thanks to the SCU Europe staff members that work hard behind the the scenes. And last but not least thanks to all the attendees for trusting us and encouraging us to continue with SCU Europe It was great to have you all and I am looking forward to welcome you again next in Berlin!

Cheers
Marcel

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System Center Universe 2015 Europe is just around the corner – will you be there?

Posted on 26/07/2015 by Marcel Zehner

In 4 weeks we will kick off the annual community conference “System Center Universe 2015 Europe” (SCU) for the third time. We again brought together some of the best speakers on the planet to present on systems & cloud management topics around Microsoft System Center, Azure, Hyper-V, Office 365, Windows Server, Windows 10 and much more. In 3 days you have a chance to select from more than 60 breakout sessions that are organized in 4 main tracks plus 1 side track. Many 3rd party vendors will be present in the expo hall so that you can learn about their products and solutions. If you want to exchange with the experts directly, you can use the ask-the-experts area or the 1-to-few side meetings.

We are very proud to host this conference again and hope you make your way to Basel-Switzerland to be part of this community happening!

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My new certification: MCSD – Azure Solutions Architect … or why I re-focus

Posted on 06/07/2015 by Marcel Zehner

Normally I do not blog about certifications I earned, but this one is somewhat special. The IT industry is transitioning, going through huge changes and the term “cloud” is in everyone’s head. This change will also impact many IT companies. They need to change their business models to be successful in the future, or – if they don’t – they will fail and disappear from the landscape. My company is also going through this change and we are in the middle of this transition, ready to help our customers to be successful with modern cloud technologies. Sure thing this also means that IT people need to re-think about the focus they have, and so do I. I am a cloud believer and want to prepare myself with the correct knowledge early enough. Therefore I decided to invest in Microsoft Azure technologies for the last months/years. This way I earned the brand new “MCSD: Azure Solutions Architect” certification. For that I needed to pass 3 exams:

  • 70-532 (Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions)
  • 70-533 (Implenenting Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions)
  • 70-534 (Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions)

I learned that if you want to be successful in the future, you have to transition yourself away from a traditional IT Pro to a more hybrid role – an IT Pro/Dev guy. That said, I am in the process to re-focus, of course not leaving my “old stuff” behind because I still love it. But this is my journey and it will of course also have an impact on my blog – so stay tuned for more Cloud/Azure related stuff in the future. Think Azure!

Hope you still come back to my blog from time to time, it’s definitely worth it!

Cheers
Marcel

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SCSM QuickVids for “SCSM 2012/2012R2 Authoring” – Video 4: Create a custom form (Step 1)

Posted on 13/04/2015 by Marcel Zehner

Shame on me! It’s exactly one year since I published my last video of this series. The idea behind this video series is to give an introduction to the authoring options you have with System Center Service Manager. In the first 3 videos I showed how one can create new classes, relationships and type projections using Visual Studio together with the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE). Now we go to the next step and will start creating a new custom form for our classes. Because this is a big topic to cover, I split it up in multiple videos. This here is the first video that shows the basic procedures about how to create a brand new form and instruct Service Manager to load it when an objects of a specific class is created or edited.

SCSM 2012/2012 R2 Authoring – Video 1: Preparing the dev environment

SCSM 2012/2012 R2 Authoring – Video 2: Create a class

SCSM 2012/2012 R2 Authoring – Video 3: Create a relationship and a type projection

SCSM 2012/2012 R2 Authoring – Video 4: Create a custom Form (Step 1)

Hint: if you experience bad video quality please download the full video to your local box and start it from there.

Ah and by the way: this is my first blog post written with Microsoft Word. Hope you like it J

Cheers
Marcel

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Speaker @ Microsoft TechNet Event, March 11 2015

Posted on 15/02/2015 by Marcel Zehner

On March 11 2015, I will present two sessions during a Microsoft TechNet in Wallisellen/Switzerland. Together with my fellow itnetx colleagues Markus Erlacher and Martin Wüthrich we will introduce the audience to (parts of) the Windows Server and System Center vNext stack.

  • Session 1: Windows Server & System Center vNext  Overview (Markus Erlacher)
  • Session 2: IT Process Automation (Marcel Zehner)
  • Session 3: EMS & Mobile Device Management (Martin Wüthrich)
  • Session 4: End-to-End Infrastructure and Service Monitoring (Marcel Zehner)

All sessions will be presented in German. Check out this link for more details and free registration:
https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032612215

See you there!
Marcel

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