Since the release of Service Manager 2012 R2 Update Rollup 6, the use of SQL Server 2014 is officially supported by Microsoft. This probably seems like a pretty good thing because for new installations you probably want to use the newest SQL Server version. And since SQL Server 2014 was released back in April 2015 more and more customers are using latest version for their System Center deployments.

Well, this all sounds pretty good in theory. However if you really want to use SQL Server 2014 together with Service Manager 2012 R2 you may run into some issues. There exists an official blog post describing how to install a secondary management server after an upgrade to SQL 2014. However installation is quite a bit of a pain because the graphical installer does not yet support installation of a management server together with SQL 2014. As soon as you get to select the database server you will be prompted with a message saying that “SQL Server is not running SQL Server 2008R2 or SQL Server2012. Please update a newest version and retry”.

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Long time since my last Service Manager Lync Up summary. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the last Lync Up sessions but this time I could make it work. And it was worth it :-) The product team shared some very interesting facts about upcoming fixes in UR9 as well as Technical Preview 4. As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. Next meeting will take place on January 19th.

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There are several blog posts out there which describe how to extend a default form with other information. One popular example is the indication of VIP users by either binding to a text or boolean value available on the selected user object.

If you read through the above noted posts you will notice that extending Service Manager forms is not a big thing and can be pretty handy to put something to attention of the analyst. Instead of binding a label to a property of a related object one can also bind it to a property of the same object of course.

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When searching for a suitable Database-as-a-Service offering, sometimes one can’t see the wood for the trees. Nearly all of the big players in public cloud business offer some kind of database service. Besides there exist plenty of smaller providers, most of them offering specific database implementations.

The above picture is far away from being complete, but it kind of shows how many players are out there offering database as a service. I picked some vendors to look at different Database-as-a-Service offerings.

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Unfortunately I missed the July Lync Up call. But I am back with the Service Manager Lync Up call summary for August. And that is a good one ;-)  The call mainly focused on demoing the upcoming new Service Manager portal. Good stuff! As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. Next meeting will take place on September 15th.

Sneak preview of new Self-Service Portal

Service Manager team is actually working on a new Self-Service Portal. This portal will not have any dependencies on Silverlight and will therefore also support multiple browsers and screens (Desktop, Mobile, Tables, etc.). Another huge improvement will be that there is no requirement for SharePoint anymore. Besides that, there will be a new knowledge articles experience where it won’t be necessary to download KB articles as a RTF anymore as well as a new caching infrastructure for faster performance. Sounds great!

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I have been blogging about 1.5 years now mostly about System Center Service Manager, Orchestrator and useful PowerShell scripts related to these products. However since the only constant in IT is change, my expertise changes too :-)

Because of the strong focus on Service Manager, I originally decided to use scsmlab as my name for the blog and twitter handle. But since I would like to open scope of this blog to more IT related topics in general instead of only Microsoft System Center Service Manager, I decided to **rename my blog to http://blog.jhnr.ch **which is a disemvoweled version of my last name :-)

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Lists in SCSM can sometimes be pretty dynamic. As an example it may be the case that you want to publish job titles for an employee joiner offering to the end users. Job titles may change over time and if your company is using kind of an external system to manage these titles together with other employee data, it would be nice to have your list updated dynamically right?

Besides many other commands, SMLets module provides you also with the following cmdlets to manage enumerations.

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A little late but I was finally able to listen to the recording of the June Service Manager Lync Up call :-) The call mainly focused on key improvements in UR7 which is planned for release on July 28th. As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. Next meeting will take place on July 21st.

Recent Service Manager blog posts and recordings

Service Manager related blog posts:

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Analysts working with Service Manager are sometimes facing problems when it comes down to communication with customers or end users. Although Service Manager Exchange Connector does provide a simple solution for creating and updating tickets by e-mail, this does barley solve the problem from an analysts perspective.

Most of you would probably love to see Analysts being able to send messages directly from Service Manager console without having to switch between Service Manager console and Outlook every few minutes…Unfortunately there is no out of the box “messaging” solution in Service Manager. So how to deal with that?

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Unfortunately I missed April LyncUp call. Luckily the Service Manager team already did a great job on summarizing pretty much all the important information which came up in the April call on the official Service Manager blog. Overall it was all about Update Rollup 6 which was released April 27th.

As always you can download the recording and the slides from here. That’s also where the recording of the May LyncUp call is available. **T****he next call is scheduled to take place on June 16th, 9 am PST. **

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