System Center 2012 Service Manager builds on its predecessor System Center Service Manager 2010, by extending the ITIL© process features to include Service Request fulfillment, Release Management, and automated orchestration with significant enhancements in its reporting capabilities. The full set of additions and improvements can be found at the official Microsoft website for the product.
System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM) is a modular product made up of a series of submodular components. Installing the product is simple using the official product documentation and online community resources.
The post-installation phase requires you to plan and configure the product in a methodical sequence. The aim of the book is to address the challenges faced by many first-time users of SCSM post-installation, and also to share valuable insight from real-world implementations.
The book is written in the Packt style, which provides the reader with independent task-oriented steps to achieve specific SCSM objectives. The authors recommend that you read the first two chapters as a background for subsequent chapters, if you are new to SCSM and process-oriented software products. The book may be read in the order of interest, but where relevant, the authors refer to dependent recipes in other chapters.
Chapter 1, ITSM Frameworks and Processes, aims to provide a background to ITSM frameworks with a particular focus on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL©) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). The objective is to explain the relevant key areas of these frameworks and how they relate to Service Manager as a solution.
Chapter 2, Personalizing SCSM 2012 Administration, covers the initial process dependent critical settings and tasks a Service Manager administrator would need to configure after successfully installing the product.
Chapter 3, Configuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs), delves into the Service Level Agreement areas of Service Manager 2012 and provides you with recipes, which simplify the implementation of this complex topic.
Chapter 4, Building the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), shows Service Manager Administrators how to build the SCSM 2012 Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The recipes in this chapter include various options, from a manual approach, right through to automating the importing of information from external systems.
Chapter 5, Deploying Service Request Fulfillment, focuses on Service Requests in Service Manager 2012. These recipes will show the reader how to set up the underlying components and all the steps required to present Service Requests to end users as catalog items in the Self-Service Portal.
Chapter 6, Working with Incident and Problem Management, takes two core features of Service Manager, Incident and Problem Management, and provides recipes that will accelerate the reader's knowledge and implementation of these vital ITSM processes.
Chapter 7, Designing Change and Release Management, provides recipes for Change and Release Management in SCSM. A modular approach is provided to aid the readers understanding of the mechanics of this complex organization specific processes.
Chapter 8, Implementing Security Roles, simplifies one of the least understood areas of System Center 2012 Service Manager, the role-based security module.
Chapter 9, Reporting, provides the recipes required to expose the wealth of information stored within Service Manager using the supported reporting interfaces to the product.
Chapter 10, Extending SCSM with Advanced Personalization, contains the recipes to take a standard SCSM deployment to an organization-specific personal implementation, using supported Authoring and Development Tools. SCSM is an extendible product but requires expert knowledge of the product's internal mechanisms.
Chapter 11, Automating Service Manager 2012, takes Service Manager to the next level by providing you with recipes that introduce automation of the ITSM processes in scope of the product.
Appendix A, Community Extensions and Third-party Commercial SCSM Solutions, presents a brief summary of some of the most requested and useful extensions to SCSM as solutions from trusted Microsoft Partners. SCSM, similar to most Microsoft products, has an extended solutions partner community.
Appendix B, Useful Websites and Community Resources, is the SCSM administrator's directory of online resources.
In order to complete all the recipes in this book you will need a minimum of three servers configured with System Center 2012 Service Manager RTM.
Server 1: System Center 2012 Service Manager management server hosting the CMDB and workflow role.
Server 2: System Center 2012 Service Manager management server hosting the data warehouse role.
Server 3: System Center 2012 Service Manager management server hosting the SharePoint based self-service portal.
The required software and deployment guides of System Center 2012 Service Manager can be found at the official Microsoft website available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh495575.aspx.
The authors recommend using the online Microsoft resource due to the frequency of updates to the product's supported requirements.
The target audience of this book is SCSM administrators and process owners responsible for implementing the ITSM processes in scope of the product. The recipes in this book range from beginner level to expert level SCSM administration knowledge. The ultimate goal is to provide the reader with knowledge to enhance their existing skills, and more importantly to share real-world experience from seasoned technology implementers.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "One generic form is bound to the System.Entity class, which ultimately all the classes inherit from."
A block of code is set as follows:
<Component Alias="Custodian">
<Seed>
<Class Type="System.Domain.User">
<Property ID="Domain"/>
<Property ID="UserName"/>
</Class>
</Seed>
</Component>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Import-Module 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\Service Manager\Powershell\System.Center.Service.Manager.psd1' $RootPath = C:\Service Manager MP Backup\ $Date = Get-Date $Path = $RootPath + $Date.ToString(yyyy-MM-dd)
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When the import process is finished, click on OK."
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