One our potential customer has asked us about a report with SLA details including durations for Manual Activities in SCSM 2012 like the ones we built for Incidents and Service Requests. The customer employed SLO for Manual Activities and wanted to get a clear picture for each SLO instance.

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.

When we just released SCUtils FileAttachmentHTML5, one my colleague told me that now we had very similar solutions for SharePoint and HTML5 self-service portals and all ‘file attachment’-related solutions published on this blog required additional steps to implement. It happened because a self-service portal URL address is hardcoded and anyone eager to apply the solutions had to change and rebuild C# code to make it working. That was true and, despite the fact that I had planned to teach you some SCSM coding, many customers preferred a plug’n’play approach. He advised me to create a settings form to keep the self-service portals address for all our future and past solutions.

Exploring the HTML5 System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager Self-Service Portal updated in January 2016 I’ve noticed one curious thing about the knowledge article’s ratings.

In the version 1.2 of SCUtils SLAInstanceDuration we have presented a new feature – a calculated “Active Duration”.

One of our customers requested a tool to get any SCSM entity by Guid. I didn’t know such a tool and decided to make that one.

After my blog post about adding Related Items tab to Manual Activity form in Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager, we have found out that some people just need the same ready-to-go solution for Review Activity.

Engaging data from deleted relationships can be very useful in some cases. For instance, to be aware if someone deletes affected users in the closed cases or replaces attachments etc.

We periodically receive requests about the SCUtils Email Connector’s connection settings for popular messaging platforms. I’ve decided to post about the connection settings used for those email systems.

First of all, I have to mention that the connection settings of the on-premise systems could be changed on the server side. So it’s a good idea to check the settings with your email administrator.

Before you begin, please make sure that IMAP or POP protocol is enabled for the email account you try to connect.

Recently I’ve received an email from our customer who asked for a script to get the status of OLAP cubes and their measure groups without using the SCSM 2012 console or SQL Management Studio. We had some pre-built scripts to work with Microsoft SQL OLAP so the task was accomplished quite easy and fast.

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.

Introduced in SCSM 2012, Service Request has lacked a Rejected status from the very beginning. If any Review Activity of a Service Request is declined, the Service Request gets a Failed status. It’s a very confusing behavior that also affects the reporting.