SCSM.SE

Hi,

In this blogpost I describe how to set up a mail notification workflow, that will send mail to the Service Owner when you add that service as an “Affected Service” when creating a new Problem.

In this example you can see that I’ve added the service E-Mail, and that the user “Administrator” is the current Business Service owner, who will recieve the mail.

The trick is to create the relationship to “Service Owner” manually in XML, since you can’t select it from the console. The relation between the problem ticket and the service is stored in “System.WorkItemAboutConfigItem”. The relationship looks like this:

<WorkflowArrayParameter Name="PrimaryUserRelationships" Type="string">
 <Item>$Context/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItemAboutConfigItem' TypeConstraint='System!System.Service']/Path[Relationship='System!System.ConfigItemOwnedByUser' TypeConstraint='System!System.User']$</Item>
</WorkflowArrayParameter>

Here is a complete Management Pack containing that workflow:

<ManagementPack ContentReadable="true" SchemaVersion="2.0" OriginalSchemaVersion="1.1" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <Manifest>
 <Identity>
 <ID>ManagementPack.77a399a63b514841aae0529b06df0070</ID>
 <Version>7.5.2905.0</Version>
 </Identity>
 <Name>Problem Created</Name>
 <References>
 <Reference Alias="EnterpriseManagement">
 <ID>Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.UI.Console</ID>
 <Version>7.5.2905.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
 <Reference Alias="CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library">
 <ID>System.WorkItem.Library</ID>
 <Version>7.5.2905.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
 <Reference Alias="CustomSystem_Library">
 <ID>System.Library</ID>
 <Version>7.5.8501.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
 <Reference Alias="EnterpriseManagement1">
 <ID>Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.UI.Administration</ID>
 <Version>7.5.2905.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
 <Reference Alias="SystemCenter">
 <ID>Microsoft.SystemCenter.Library</ID>
 <Version>7.0.8432.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
 <Reference Alias="SystemCenter1">
 <ID>Microsoft.SystemCenter.Subscriptions</ID>
 <Version>7.5.2905.0</Version>
 <PublicKeyToken>31bf3856ad364e35</PublicKeyToken>
 </Reference>
 </References>
 </Manifest>
 <Categories>
 <Category ID="Category.030336f5653f4e028b222b9bbe70bfd0" Value="EnterpriseManagement!Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.ManagementPack">
 <ManagementPackName>ManagementPack.77a399a63b514841aae0529b06df0070</ManagementPackName>
 <ManagementPackVersion>7.5.2905.0</ManagementPackVersion>
 </Category>
 <Category ID="Category.cdf0a383046642f6a47f1755c1e2978d" Target="NotificationSubscription_9fa9d9b3_80fd_4538_a82b_2a181deb61ee" Value="EnterpriseManagement1!Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Rules.WorkflowSubscriptions" />
 </Categories>
 <Monitoring>
 <Rules>
 <Rule ID="NotificationSubscription_9fa9d9b3_80fd_4538_a82b_2a181deb61ee" Enabled="true" Target="SystemCenter!Microsoft.SystemCenter.SubscriptionWorkflowTarget" ConfirmDelivery="true" Remotable="true" Priority="Normal" DiscardLevel="100">
 <Category>System</Category>
 <DataSources>
 <DataSource ID="DS" TypeID="SystemCenter1!Microsoft.SystemCenter.CmdbInstanceSubscription.DataSourceModule">
 <Subscription>
 <InstanceSubscription Type="422afc88-5eff-f4c5-f8f6-e01038cde67f">
 <AddInstance />
 </InstanceSubscription>
 <PollingIntervalInSeconds>60</PollingIntervalInSeconds>
 <BatchSize>100</BatchSize>
 </Subscription>
 </DataSource>
 </DataSources>
 <WriteActions>
 <WriteAction ID="WA" TypeID="SystemCenter1!Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.SystemCenter.Subscription.WindowsWorkflowTaskWriteAction">
 <Subscription>
 <VisibleWorkflowStatusUi>true</VisibleWorkflowStatusUi>
 <EnableBatchProcessing>true</EnableBatchProcessing>
 <WindowsWorkflowConfiguration>
 <AssemblyName>Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Notifications.Workflows</AssemblyName>
 <WorkflowTypeName>Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Notifications.Workflows.SendNotificationsActivity</WorkflowTypeName>
 <WorkflowParameters>
 <WorkflowParameter Name="SubscriptionId" Type="guid">$MPElement$</WorkflowParameter>
 <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="DataItems" Type="string">
 <Item>$Data/.$</Item>
 </WorkflowArrayParameter>
 <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="InstanceIds" Type="string">
 <Item>$Data/BaseManagedEntityId$</Item>
 </WorkflowArrayParameter>
 <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="TemplateIds" Type="string">
 <Item>ee7a7670-9f96-70b3-68f2-44b8f153006e</Item>
 </WorkflowArrayParameter>
 <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="PrimaryUserRelationships" Type="string">
 <Item>$Context/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItemAboutConfigItem' TypeConstraint='System!System.Service']/Path[Relationship='System!System.ConfigItemOwnedByUser' TypeConstraint='System!System.User']$</Item>
 </WorkflowArrayParameter>
 </WorkflowParameters>
 <RetryExceptions />
 <RetryDelaySeconds>60</RetryDelaySeconds>
 <MaximumRunningTimeSeconds>7200</MaximumRunningTimeSeconds>
 </WindowsWorkflowConfiguration>
 </Subscription>
 </WriteAction>
 </WriteActions>
 </Rule>
 </Rules>
 </Monitoring>
 <LanguagePacks>
 <LanguagePack ID="ENU" IsDefault="false">
 <DisplayStrings>
 <DisplayString ElementID="ManagementPack.77a399a63b514841aae0529b06df0070">
 <Name>Problem Created</Name>
 </DisplayString>
 <DisplayString ElementID="NotificationSubscription_9fa9d9b3_80fd_4538_a82b_2a181deb61ee">
 <Name>Problem Created</Name>
 </DisplayString>
 </DisplayStrings>
 </LanguagePack>
 <LanguagePack ID="SVE" IsDefault="false">
 <DisplayStrings>
 <DisplayString ElementID="NotificationSubscription_9fa9d9b3_80fd_4538_a82b_2a181deb61ee">
 <Name>Problem Created</Name>
 </DisplayString>
 </DisplayStrings>
 </LanguagePack>
 </LanguagePacks>
 </ManagementPack>

Times flies when you are having fun – MMS is over for this year!

For those of you waiting for an announcement of new versions or new products, I’m sorry to dissapoint you… Nothing new were announced or informed this year. But that doesn’t mean that MMS was bad, no, not at all! To be honest, I had a great time – meeting old and making new friends, attending to great sessions with great speakers, hosted a Birds of a Feather session with my authoring friends, recorded a MVA video together with Brad Bird (thanks for inviting me!) and last but not least, arranging the Friends of SCSM event.

Meeting old and making new friends

This is one of the best thing with MMS. To meet people in person and get a face on that person which name you’ve seen so many times on the forums, blogs, mail list or whatever. The networking oppertunities during MMS is without a doubt the best!

Great sessions with great speakers

As usual, MMS is packed with loads of great sessions! If you weren’t able to attend or if the session you wanted to see collided with each other, you can always take a look at the sessions now from your computer:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013

I just want to highlight two great sessions which i really encourage you to watch:

“Configuring Service Manager for Performance and Scale” with Nathan Lasnoski
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/SD-B312

“Best Practices For Runbook Authoring and Managing Orchestrator” with Pete Zerger and Anders Bengtsson
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/SD-B317

Birds of a Feather

You probably know that I co-authered the book called System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook with some System Center ninjas? Well, anyway, Steve Beaumont figured it would be nice to arrange a Birds of a Feather to cover things we weren’t able to cover in the book and answer questions that you might have had. Said and done – here’s all the authors on the stage hosting the BoF called “System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook – Desserts Chapter”.

From left to right: Me, Dieter Gasser, Andreas Baumgarten, Sam Erskine, Steve Beaumont

Signing some books

Recorded a video for MVA

This was a really unexpected thing that my friend Brad Bird invited me to do. He had been invited to record a video on Service Manager Architecture and Connectors and asked me to join him – which I gladly did! Thanks for the invite Brad!

I have no idea how the video turned out yet – hopefully it is okey but I wish Brad and I would have gotten the time to rehearse it atleast once before recording it! 😛

Ongoing recording!

Friends of SCSM

This is something that Andreas Baumgarten and I arranged for the first time last year, but since everyone seemed to like the concept of it, we arranged it this year as well. Basically, we invited a big group of Service Manager enthusiast and made sure there was a place where we all could gather to have some food and beer. How could food and beer together with great discussions regarding Service Manager and community projects be anything other than great success? 🙂

Do you recognize any of the people in these pictures? 🙂

So to sum it all up – MMS 2013 was great and I really hope we’ll see MMS in Las Vegas next year as well!

If you need to update the format of how the timestamp in the portal is displayed (from 12-hour to 24-hour for example), go to the Portal with a Sharepoint-admin account.

Go to the Site Actions-button in the top-left corner, select Site Settings.

Under Site Administration, click Regional settings. Adjust the format to the desired setting and click “Ok”.

The Update Rollup 2 for System Center Service Pack 1 has just been released.

Here’s the patch notes for Service Manager.

Service Manager (KB2828618)

Issue 1
If the number of “Manual Activities” that are displayed in the Service Manager Portal exceeds a certain limit, page loads may time out and do not render correctly. This results in a blank page.

Issue 2
Incorrect cleanup of a custom related type causes grooming on the EntityChangeLog table to stall. This causes the table to grow significantly.

Issue 3
Service requests complete unexpectedly because of a race condition between workflows.

Issue 4
The console crashes when you double-click a parent incident link on an extended incident class.

Issue 5
PowerShell tasks that were created by using the authoring tool do not run because of an incorrect reference to certain assemblies.

Issue 6
The Exchange management pack is stuck in a Pending state after management pack synchronization.

So we have fixes for several bugs, where I’d say that Issue 3 is the one that caused me most pain.

I’ve not been able to test it yet and won’t be able to do so until I get back home from the MMS in Vegas, but if I find anything unexpected I’ll update this post.

Note that it doesn’t look like that the Exchange connector is included in the UR itself, so my guess is that we’ll see it as a separate download.

See this link for all details:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2802159

It’s a real honor to be renewed as a “System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management” MVP for 2013! This will be my second year as an MVP and I’m really looking forward for another year with the “CDM family”. It’s great to have a group of likeminded people to discuss and share your ideas and questions with!

Regards
//Anders Asp

Many people work with Service Manager in English, regardless their native language and are therfore used to the English terminology of the product. In SCSM 2012 you can easily configure this by going to the language menu and selecting English.

When using the Service Manager Integration Pack (IP) in Orchestrator on the other hand, there are no straight forward way to configure the language the IP runs under though. I mean, the actual IP is in English, but the data retreived from SCSM might not be in English. In this example below you can probably tell that classes is displayed in another language than English – it’s actually in Swedish!

So why are the classes displayed in Swedish and not English?

Well, it turns out that the data retreived is actually displayed in the same language as your selected Format. So if you want to make sure that the data retreived from Service Manager is displayed in English, you have to go to Control Panel –> Region and change the Format to English. And this is on the user account running the Runbook Designer, not the account used for the actual IP Connection.

After you’ve made this change, restart the Runbook Designer and give it another try. The data retreived should now be in English.

… and yeah, changing the format affects plenty of other things as well. The format of the clock for instance…

Update Feb 26:

Found an error in the Workflow parameters for Change and Service Request, so the MP is now updated.

Update Jan 24:

Uploaded a new version with mail templates included, and Problem, Release and Activity workflows added.

/There are several blog posts out there about how to create a MP with a workflow that sends an E-Mail to the “Assigned To” -user when that field gets updated, but most of them have only been for Incidents or only for Service Requests.

I have gathered these workflows in one MP, so the mail workflow will trigger the same way for all processes. Mail templates are also included in the MP.

• Incident
• Change Request
• Service Request
• Problem
• Release
• Manual Activity
• Review Activity

Before you import the MP, you might want to disable those notifications that you don’t want. The code in the MP looks like this:

<Rule ID="IncidentAssignmentChanges" Enabled="true">

With the parameter “Enabled” you can enable or disable each workflow.

Download MP: Lumagate.AssignedToNotification.xml

I often hear customers asking for an easier way to see all their active Work Items and if it’s possible to create a “My Work Items” view. The answer to this question is both yes and no.

Yes, it’s possible to create a “My Work Items” view, the thing is that you will not be able to filter out the closed Work Items for each class. Why? Because the Status property is not a property on the Work Item class itself, but rather a property of each and every class underneath Work Item (such as Incident, Problem, Change etc.).

For more details, please see this post including the comments written in it:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2010/09/28/all-work-items-assigned-to-me-view.aspx

There are some third party vendors that have observed this “issue” though and created their own solutions for this.

For instance:
http://www.cireson.com/app-store/scsm-my-work-items/
http://blog.scsmsolutions.com/2012/08/ave-pro-my-work-items-view/
http://www.caseddimensions.com/system_center_service_manager_assigned_to_me/
http://www.gridprosoftware.com/produkter/powerpack

I’m sure all the solutions above works great, but the downside is that you will have to pay some money to get it. So what are the alternatives for those of us who don’t want to pay for this and are unable to develop something like this ourselves? Well, using nothing but Service Manager and Notepad, one of your best bets might look like this:

Now, this doesn’t give you one single view to look at, but instead of having the different “My …” views spread out through the console, I’ve gathered them all in a single place. The upside with using several views instead of one common, is that we are able to create richer views for each process. You can display very specific details for each process in the different views – something that wouldn’t work in one common view because it would be way to cluttered.

If you want to use this approach you can download the complete MP here (updated 2013-09-20):

MyWorkItems.zip