Our management packs for Microsoft SCOM use numerus rules based on SNMP traps. For instance, in the management pack for APC UPS monitoring has more than 100 rules.

Last year I published a blog post about using SCUtils FileAttachment to send notifications to reviewers with links to the documents attached to the Review Activities in Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager. The solution lets reviewers download the attached files from the SCSM self-service portal based on SharePoint platform.

A bit while ago, Microsoft released a new HTML5 self-service portal and I decided to revise all previously published solutions to support seamlessly both types of the portal. I created a small add-on that keeps the portal URL and it’s required to make this solution works.

I’ve got a request from our customer who asked for a help with a SCSM console’s customization. He complained that IT analysts in Incident classification category sometimes set values that had sublevels. Most of time it happened by mistake but in the reports it caused ambiguity and miscounts.

Last week we’ve got a request from our customer in Latin America who wanted to notify an affected user with an attachment link when the attachment is added to Incidents. There’s a solution published on TechNet Service Manager blog that can be used to create a notification workflow. However, using this approach you can send a message with all attachments instead of last one.

Almost two years ago, we have posted about adding a comment in the SCSM Action Log about a review decision. PowerShell is an excellent tool but the performance of Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager is always an area to improve.

In one of my previous post I wrote about how to set a status of declined Service Requests to Rejected instead of Failed. I received many thanks from the community and that was pleasant. However, one reader, Martin, added a comment about Close task that couldn’t be applied to Rejected Service Requests.

Recently I’ve met on the TechNet Service Manager forum a request about an issue with ‘Attached By’ field in the SCSM Problem form. After you attach a file and then click on Apply or OK button in the SCSM Problem form, you cannot see who is attached the file. I’ve never put any attention for that but a quick check proved the issue in the Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager SP1 and R2.

Recently we have received a request from a customer that wanted to use our free product, SCUtils File Attachment, to let end users open file attachments related to the knowledge articles. Sometimes it is suitable to attach files like Word templates, scripts, large documents rather than place all these things into an internal content of a knowledge article. The customer planned to put direct links to the file attachments inside knowledge articles but did not want to query a SCSM SQL database each time to find InstanceID to create a link like this:

Yesterday I participated in the Service Manager Customer LyncUp call and even typed two messages. I expected to see a road map for the Service Manager vNext but my expectations remain my expectations. However, I noticed that some people asked the product team about a feature request/bug fix that would allow editing the LDAP query filters of Active Directory connectors in Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager. Currently you have to create a new connector because those settings are grayed out.

After SCUtils FileAttachment was released, we started to receive questions about the use of this add-on. For those who can use Orchestrator to send the notification, using the solution is a very simple and straight task. But if you want to use the notification templates of Microsoft System Center 2012 Service manager, it could be a bit complex thing.

In one of our previous posts, we presented a knowledge management report based on the OLAP cube. In this post, I provide management packs required to create a report that utilizes Reporting Services.

In my previous post, I published a notification workflow that informs an assigned IT analyst about a new assignment to a Manual Activity with “In Progress” status. Soon I got a feedback that it would be fine if the workflow also sends an email for the users assigned to Review Activities. 

I spent most of my last weekend to help our customer to solve the situation with notifications for affected users. Originally, the customer had set up following the notification workflows:

1. If a new incident is created, send an email to an affected user with details;
2. If a new service request is created, send an email to an affected user with details.

For the beginning, let’s invite you in our recent history. In our first project with Service Manager we used Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010. And not surprising, our customer insisted that SLA target resolution time for each ticket had to be adjusted in accordance with the customer’s working schedule and calendar. SCSM 2010 did not provide this functionality and we built our first complex customization for Service Manager.

Last year we published a post about creating a report that presents the results of the satisfaction survey for Incidents in Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager. The blog’s post described the steps required to create a similar report for Service Requests. However, not all of our customers have enough time and skills to deal with reporting in the SCSM.