Morten Meisler – CTGlobal

Send Email for SCSM 2016 – Service Request

System Center Service Manager 2016 have been released for quite a while now and more and more are starting the upgrade process. As you probably know, the .NET framework has also been bumped to 4.5.1, which effectively means that all solutions made in the old .NET 3.5 Framework also needs to be upgraded. Microsoft have done their part, but all custom solutions needs to be upgraded as well as community solutions. One of those solutions is the popular Send Email made my Travis Wright for Incident (codeplex project uploaded by Christian Booth)and later adopted to Service Requests by Patrick Sundqvist. [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2017-03-27T23:08:18+00:00 March 27th, 2017|Service Manager (SCSM)|4 Comments

VIP Users Part 2 or how to synchronize group membership from AD to SCSM

Dealing with VIP users is a common practice within Service Management. This old blogpost explains a very good approach to mark VIP users in SCSM as VIP users. We simply extend the User class with an extra boolean property (true/false) and we then expose that property on the Incident right under the Affected User. That way Analysts can quickly see if the person is VIP and you can also make various workflows or notifications based on this property. What is missing in the above post is how we figure out who is VIP or not. For many, this relationship [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2017-08-30T11:48:15+00:00 November 15th, 2016|Automation, Powershell, Service Manager (SCSM)|2 Comments

Azure Automation + Slack + Service Manager

In this post I will demonstrate an example on how to use the popular team collaboration tool Slack together with Azure Automation to retrieve data from your on-premise SCSM environment. The data in this example are Incidents retrieved via an Azure Powershell runbook. The setup is very simple and does not require any development skills (only a little powershell ). The scope could easily be extended to more useful scenarious such as sending reviewal messages to your managers or perhaps a Change Advisory Board (CAB) to accept or decline Review Activities in their small team meeting room. This is just [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2016-09-21T16:37:43+00:00 September 21st, 2016|Azure, Service Manager (SCSM)|1 Comment

Cireson Portal – Getting started with customization and general tips & tricks

This post is made to help you get started with customizing the Cireson self-service Portal, but also includes a collection of customization code examples and tips you perhaps didn’t know about. The blogpost will mainly focus on customization done in CSS and Javascript/jQuery and not the customization you can do via the Cireson administration GUI or JSON files. If you are new to the Cireson Portal I would recommend you to read up on some of the good knowledge articles Cireson has on the topic. I’ve gathered a list here which also include some external ressources from the community. [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2017-08-30T12:31:18+00:00 July 12th, 2016|Service Manager (SCSM)|0 Comments

SCSM Send Email for Cireson Analyst Portal

07-12-2016 Updated to support Cireson Portal 6+ Many people still use the community solution called Send Email made by Travis Wright for Incident and later extended to Service Requests by Patrick Sundqvist. This allows the analyst to write a message to the Affected User or other related users on the Incident or Service Request and wrap the message in a nice email notification with prefilled information of your own choosing. Example: At the same time you can control what should happen to the Incident or Service Request after the email has been sent – for example if the Message [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2017-08-22T09:28:44+00:00 December 15th, 2015|Service Manager (SCSM), Tools|0 Comments

How are my SCSM views performing?

Powershell script to analyze all existing SCSM Views and find out if there is any performance issues.

By Morten Meisler| 2015-10-19T12:50:19+00:00 October 19th, 2015|Service Manager (SCSM)|1 Comment

Impacted Business Services – Free console task for SCSM

UPDATE: 24-11-2015: Version 2.0: Added support for localization. Open the new provided Coretech.ImpactedBusinessService.Configuration.xml Management Pack and edit/add language pack sections (instructions inside) Example of German translation (thanks to Florian Schwendtner): Added ability to choose own columns related to the System.Service class (instructions inside configuration management pack) The Listview is now a Service Manager listview Added new transparent task icon Often you want to quickly determine which Business Service(s) is affected/impacted from a Change Request when making a certain change to a Configuration Item, e.g. a database, computer, network component etc. There is no quick way to achieve this today [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2015-05-12T12:46:53+00:00 May 12th, 2015|Service Manager (SCSM)|2 Comments

Service Manager powershell snippets

Merry x-mas! In today’s December calendar tips & trick I'm going to a post some useful powershell snippets for Service Manager. As we all know, the December 11th is the special day where the Bethlehem-powershell star outshined all the others. The scripts here is mostly for administrative purposes. They are of course provided “as-is” so feel free to expand/optimize/ include more error handling etc. Create Management Pack UPDATE: Script now works with different windows localization. Default language will now be set according to the console language user preference and not the windows locale Unfortunately we are not [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2014-12-11T09:36:00+00:00 December 11th, 2014|Powershell, Service Manager (SCSM)|0 Comments

AD-Connector – Running with Error: Stopping at 92% – Object instance not set to an instance of an object

Yesterday I encountered an error I haven’t seen before when trying to set up a new AD Connector in SCSM. The connector always stopped at 92% and generated the following error in the eventlog: [crayon-59e71cbb02abf407201972/] As I couldn’t find anything on the net, I started digging into the error. The error says something about Managers relationship, so I figured I needed to look there. It turned out that there was 10 disabled users in AD that still had Direct Report Users in their AD User. So in other words: some people had a Manager that was disabled. And since [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2014-01-29T10:47:38+00:00 January 29th, 2014|Service Manager (SCSM)|1 Comment

Set-SCSMTemplateWithActivities powershell script

UPDATE 02-01-2014: Fixed some issues in script When dealing with the cmdlet: Set-SCSMTemplate in SMLets, you might have noticed that if you apply a template with activities, the prefix of the ID’s (e.g. RA300 or MA250) is all missing. And it’s the same issue if done via the SDK or Orchestrator. One workaround, described by Lee Berg here: http://www.leealanberg.com/blog/2013/03/13/scsm-automated-service-request-smlets-creation-issues-and-work-arrounds/ is to modify the management pack that contains the template, and then insert the prefix like this: MA{0}. This approach works, but can be quite cumbersome as it takes time to do and also “locks” the template so any modification [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2013-12-27T15:05:28+00:00 December 27th, 2013|Powershell, Scripting & Development, Service Manager (SCSM)|17 Comments

Solution to clean User Input from Service Manager Portal and commit it to the Action Log

This solution converts end-user userinput from Service Manager Portal into a clean formated string table and commits it to a new Action Log entry in top. The script can be modified for other purposes: e.g. used in Orchestrator or appended to the description field.

By Morten Meisler| 2013-09-20T16:32:33+00:00 September 20th, 2013|Service Manager (SCSM)|32 Comments

How to create a link to a Knowledge Article in an email template

What if I told you.. you could make a direct link to a knowledge article that is attached to an Incident (or other workitems) and present it in an email template to a user. Scenario: 1) The supporter gets a new Incident from an end-user: 2) Instead of writing the same message over and over, he or she decides to attach a knowledge article related to the issue and send a little message along to the end-user: 3) The end-user then receives a new email triggered from the SendEmail worklfow 4) He can then click on the link and [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2013-08-01T21:29:56+00:00 August 1st, 2013|Service Manager (SCSM)|1 Comment

Service Manager 2012 R2 Preview – Features and updates

Just installed Service Manager 2012 R2 Preview version! Download available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/system-center-2012-r2.aspx As I couldn't find any good release notes information, I thought I'd make a first-move on any new stuff. I will try to update this post regularly as I discover things. These are the official release notes: What's new in Service Manager 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn299380.aspx Release notes for Service Manager 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn299381.aspx The links sound promising, but doesn't actually state anything. Installation I installed this on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Standard edition with SQL2012(yeah why not go all in on R2? ). [...]

By Morten Meisler| 2013-06-25T16:42:48+00:00 June 25th, 2013|Service Manager (SCSM)|1 Comment