It’s been a while since my last blog post. I’ve been pretty busy this summer :-) As some of you may have noticed, I published a Service Manager app called PrettyPrint on Technet Gallery. I announced the first release in September at System Center Universe Europe in my session with Marcel Zehner about Service Manager customizations. The SCU session recording can be found on Channel9.

The now released version fixes a bug where the PrettyPrint task failed with the following message when starting from a form and if the settings were configured not to show Word print preview. This was actually a pretty annoying bug and to fix this I had to use a custom print dialog. This is because the WPF PrintDialog is missing an owner property which makes it unusable from UI threads other than the main UI thread (the Service Manager console main window in this case).

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Together with Marcel Zehner I hosted a session at System Center Universe Europe 2014 which took place in September. Me and Marcel were presenting a collection of useful real-world customizations that we have built for customers during the last years. If you would like to see the session, Microsoft made the session recordings available for you on Channel9.

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Update: As Trang mentioned in the comments, the first version of the script only found templates which are assigned to a Notification Subscription. I updated the script to look for templates which are assigned either to a Workflow or Notification Subscription.

Sometimes I come across Service Manager environments which have a whole bunch of notification subscriptions and corresponding templates configured. Normally these environments are productive for some time and several changes have been made to processes and notifications.

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Don’t you think that sometimes it would be very handy if we could change some properties of a related object directly from a form? Normally you would have to close the active form and edit the related object to make some changes which can be pretty time consuming… As it turns out, there is another way to simplify this procedure by using a custom ListView :-) All you need is a custom Service Manager form which contains a ListView to display related objects. And as you can see below, it is possible to configure the ListView to display TextBoxes and even ListPickers to enable users to change properties of related objects shown in the list.

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As I was doing another Service Manager 2012 R2 Upgrade lately, I added some minor improvements to my Upgrade to Service Manager 2012 R2 Checklist.

If you have any corrections or thoughts about improving the checklist, please let me know. I would be happy to update the OneNote file so others can benefit from your knowledge.

I provide this checklist as-is and cannot guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of information available from the checklist. In addition to this checklist, also check out detailed instructions by Microsoft on how to upgrade your environment to System Center Service Manager 2012 R2.

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If you are working with Service Manager you definitively know the default workspaces aka wunderbars which separate for example Work Item views from Config Item views. Sometimes it would be very handy to be able to create your own workspaces which could for example separate your custom CI classes and views from the default Service Manager views. However, creating a new workspace in Service Manager Console is not possible. But guess what: This can be done by manually adding some XML code to one of your Management Packs.

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As I was doing some Service Manager 2012 R2 Upgrades lately, I created a OneNote page which will guide me through the installation process and help me not to forget anything important :-) Since this checklist may be useful to other people out there who are upgrading from Service Manager 2012 SP1 to Service Manager 2012 R2, I decided to share my Upgrade to Service Manager 2012 R2 Checklist.

I provide this checklist as-is and cannot guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of information available from the checklist. In addition to this checklist, also check out detailed instructions by Microsoft on how to upgrade your environment to System Center Service Manager 2012 R2.

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As you may know, Service Manager uses so called user roles to allow access to the application. A user which is member of a specific user role is able to perform tasks associated to this user role. As Kurt van Hoecke describes in one of his posts, each user role contains a specific user profile which defines which operations on an object are allowed. Existing work item classes like Incidents and Service Requests do have a default user profile already defined. As long as you use the out of the box Service Manager work item classes you will probably never have to mess around with user profiles. However, when you are going to customize one of the existing classes or if you create new work item classes and want to have tight control over access to objects of this class, you will have to deal with user profiles.

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One of my customers came up with the request to add some quick launch navigation links in Service Manager portal. Quick launch navigation links are located on the navigation pane on the Service Manager portal and reference, among other things, to My Requests and Help Articles.

So far no problem because these navigation links can be added pretty straightforward by editing the portal’s Sharepoint site. I wrote a blog post some time ago about how to localize these links. If you are interested in how to add a link, check out this article on Microsoft TechNet. However the customer wanted these links to open in a new browser tab instead of the active one. Unfortunately it is not possible do configure this behavior for a navigation link. There is no such option as “Open in new Window”. All you can configure is a URL, name and parent navigation node.

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Probably anyone who has ever used Service Manager knows the pain involved when communicating 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.

Analysts often have to check with someone (mostly the affected user in case of incidents) to get all the information they need or to send instructions. It would be nice if they could do this directly from Service Manager console because switching between Service Manager console and Outlook every few minutes can be pretty painful…

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