For this June LyncUp call, the product team shared some very interesting facts about upcoming migration of Service Manager 2012R2 to Service Manager 2016. This was a very passionate Lync Up call with great feedback from both attendees and product group, so I definitively recommend watching the recording. I probably was not able to cover all comments and feedback made during the call.

As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. Next meeting will take place on July 19th.

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As you may know, I published PrettyPrint for Service Manager back in 2014. Since then, I got a lot of positive feedback for this Service Manager extension and I thought that it would be a good idea to publish PrettyPrint source code, so everyone can profit from and contribute to the project.

You can find the source code on GitHub. It is published under GNU General Public License. Please feel free to check out and extend the code with your own ideas. If you would like to contribute to the project, let me know. I would be happy to add you as contributor. If you find any bugs or would like to create a feature request, please report it on the GitHub issues page. Please remember that I am not a developer, so there may be room for improvement regarding code quality ;-)

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When I recently installed Service Manager 2016 Technical Preview 5, I also installed the new out of the box Self-Service portal. However after installation finished successfully, I experienced an odd behavior: The portal did no show up in it’s usual design.

As you can see below, the CSS stylesheets were transferred with the wrong MIME type text/plain which caused the portal to be unusable for users.

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Today I attended a great webinar hosted by Patrik Sundqvist. There are some awesome features coming in new version of Request Management for Windows Azure Pack! If you have not yet seen it, I recommend attending the second webinar on May 12th to see some nice demo scenarios. And since I always forget about details which are presented in those webinars I decided to summarize content and share it here :-)

Update: Gridpro just published the recording of the webinar here.

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For this April LyncUp call, the product team shared some interesting facts about upcoming improvements in Technical Preview 5 as well as SCCM support. Actually it was mostly the same as already presented in February LyncUp call. But still interesting to see some pretty cool performance improvements in next version of Service Manager 🙂

As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. Next meeting will take place on May 17th.

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According to Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business the Cloud Computing hype seems to be over and we are entering the phase of disillusionment.

However when speaking with IT people about Public Cloud, most of the time they are pretty enthusiastic about this whole new level of elasticity which is possible when running workloads on a Public Cloud. But on the other hand people are concerned about security, privacy and legal restrictions when using the Public Cloud. Given the recent issues with the U.S.-EU Safe-Harbor framework, companies may be forced to (re-)think their cloud strategy.

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For this February LyncUp call, the product team shared some interesting facts about upcoming improvements in Technical Preview 5. Seems as if we are going to see some pretty cool performance improvements in next version of Service Manager :-)

As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. Next meeting will take place on March 15th.

Update Rollup 9

As you may already know, Update Rollup 9 has been pulled since it was resetting the customizations because it replaces some unsealed Management Packs and was causing console crashes while opening forms in non-English Service Manager console.

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When creating your own custom forms in Service Manager you may want to tweak your ListViews, especially when working with dates. For example you may want to hide time information for datetime properties. This is actually pretty simple by using BindingBase.StringFormat property

The below example shows a ListView definition containing two datetime columns both formatted to show date in the format ‘dd.MM.yyyy’ Properties do not necessary have to be bound to a ListVew column. Of course you can use StringFormat also to format text displayed in a TextBox for example.

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Since everyone is talking about Operation Management Suite (OMS) at the moment, I wanted to take a look at this relatively new cloud service on my own. There are several good blog posts out there which explain what OMS does and what it does not.

From a personal point of view I was especially interested in the Linux agent which is available in preview since some weeks. Stefan Roth already wrote a great post about basic architecture and installation of the Linux agent. I will not go into much detail about basic installation and architecture of OMS agent for Linux.

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As some may have noticed I did some changes to this blog recently. First I decided to change the theme of my blog to something more simplistic. After some searching around the web I found a great Wordpress theme named Independent Publisher. I definitively recommend checking out this theme if you are running a Wordpress blog. It’s very reader-focused and also entirely open-source.

Besides that, I opted for enabling SSL for the whole site. Visitors will now automatically be redirected to the secure version of this site. Encryption is done by using free certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

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