Reporting trap in SCSM 2012 with Exchange Connector

As many of you know, in Service Manager 2012 it is not easy to find out who exactly marked a Manual Activity as Completed. This information can be found in the history of the Manual Activity where the user is mentioned in the form of so-called 'Down-Level Logon Name' or DOMAIN\UserName. Needless to say that sometimes it is hard to realize that Contoso\josmi is actually John Smith.

Until last week, I considered that for a Review Activity there was no such an ambiguity because in the Service manager’s form of the Review Activity anyone can find in the list of the reviewers a column named Voted By where you can see the display name of the person who voted. Moreover, there is a relationship System.ReviewerVotedByUser between System.Reviewer and System.User that helps getting the actual voter in reports, etc.

Unfortunately, in the real life you cannot rely on that if your company use the Service manager with Microsoft Exchange Connector. The Exchange Connector simply doesn’t create an instance of the relationship and the column Voted By in the Review Activity’s form remains unpopulated after the vote is processed and accepted by the Exchange Connector. The reason for this behavior is unclear but perhaps because the Exchange Connector accepts a vote from the email’s sender only if the sender is matching to the reviewer.

Now we have two cases. The first one is for a vote recorded by the Service Manager console or through the Service Manager self-service portal and second one is for the vote recorded by Exchange Connector. That leads to the fact that we cannot rely on the reports made using ReviewerVotedByUserFact in the Data Warehouse or Change and Activity Management Cube.

Last week I met this situation when our client reported that a report we just made didn’t include an information about some voters. We couldn’t reproduce the situation because we used SCUtils Email Connector in our labs but finally the client and we found out what’s the source of the issue. We bypassed the bug but I want to warn that you cannot trust reports that rely on System.ReviewerVotedByUser, ReviewerVotedByUserFact, Change and Activity Management Cube for the information about the voters if you use the Exchange Connector.

Updated: In the release v3.1 of the Exchange ConnectorExchange Connector the issue has been fixed but only for SCSM 2012 R2.