SCSM.SE

It’s finally in the stores! 🙂

Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-System-Service-Manager-Cookbook/dp/1849686947/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1351668900&sr=8-2&keywords=service+manager+cookbook

AdLibris (Swedish site):
http://www.adlibris.com/se/product.aspx?isbn=1849686947

A big thanks to Sam, Andreas, Steve and Dieter for a job well done! It was a pleasure working with you all!

Ever tried sending a notification to Affected User of the parent Work Item of an Activity when the Activity is updated? When trying to create this subscription from the SCSM console, you are faced with this when selecting the Related Recipient:

Holy cow! You are presented with a massive ammount of relationships to choose between! I tried a couple of relationships here without any luck, and figured that it would be easier to do this in the XML code.

So let’s say we have a Service Request with a number of activities in it. When one of these activities are completed, we want to notify the Affected User of the Service Request that the particular activity is completed.

1. Go to Administration -> Notifications -> Subscriptions and click Create Subscription task.
2. Click Next on the “Before you being” page.
3. Give the Subscription a Name and Description. Chose to trigger the notification whenever an object is updated and as the targeted class, use an activity class. In this example I will work with the Review Activity class. Chose a Management Pack to store this Subscription in and click Next.
   
   
4. Click Next at the Group/Queue Selection page.
5. In the Additional Criteria, specify whenever you want this Subscription to trigger. I will trigger whenever the status of a Review Activity with a certain title changes. Click next.
   
   
6. Select a Notification template to use when sending the notification and click Next.
7. Click Next at the Recipient page.
8. Now, at the Related Recipients, click Add and select the “Contains Activity” relationship. Then select the Affected User and click Add followed by Next.
   
   
   Note: When configured this way, the Subscription will actually try to notify the Affected User of any containing activities of the Review Activity! This is what we are going to change in the XML later on.
9. Click Create followed by Close.
10. Now, go to Administration -> Management Packs and locate the Management Pack in which you stored this Subscription. Export it by using the Export task.
11. Open this exported Management Pack with your favorite XML editor (I use Notepad++ but regular Notepad will do it as well).
12. Locate the Subscription within your MP and scroll down a couple of lines to the WriteActions section. Within this section you should have a couple of lines of code that looks like this:

    <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="PrimaryUserRelationships" Type="string">
    <Item>$Context/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItemContainsActivity' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItem.Activity']/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItemAffectedUser' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_Library!System.User']$</Item>
    </WorkflowArrayParameter>

    This is the code where we have to do some editing. We would like to reverse the Contains Acitivty relationship, so instead of looking at the Affected User of any containing acitivities of this particular Review Acitivty, we would like to select the Affected User of the Work Item in which this acivity is contained. (Hope that this make some kinde of sense?)Note: The easiest way to locate your Subscription is to search for the name you specified when it was created. This will take you to the DisplayString section where you want to copy the ElementID from the line above the subscription name. Now do a new search for this ElementID until you get to a row that starts with <Rules ID=”….

13.  So to reverse the relationship we need to add SeedRole=’Target’ right after WorkItemContainsAcitivy relationship, like this:

    $Context/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItemContainsActivity' SeedRole='Target'
    

    Next we need to change the Work Item type we are working with. As of now it is specified as the Acitivity class, so let’s change it to the Work Item class instead.

    TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItemAffectedUser' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_Library!System.User']$
    

    Note: Make sure you have the reference to System.WorkItem.Library specified in you MP. I’m referring to that MP with the Alias CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library because it was already present in my MP.

14. And just to make it even more clear, here’s the code before we edited it:

    <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="PrimaryUserRelationships" Type="string">
    <Item>$Context/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItemContainsActivity' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItem.Activity']/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItemAffectedUser' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_Library!System.User']$</Item>
    </WorkflowArrayParameter>
    

    And here’s the code after we edited it:

    <WorkflowArrayParameter Name="PrimaryUserRelationships" Type="string">
    <Item>$Context/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Activity_Library!System.WorkItemContainsActivity' SeedRole='Target' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Path[Relationship='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItemAffectedUser' TypeConstraint='CustomSystem_Library!System.User']$</Item>
    </WorkflowArrayParameter>
    

    And here it is in a picture, marked with the changes:
    

15. Now save the changes and head back to the SCSM Console.
16. Go to Administration -> Management Packs and Import the MP by using the Import task.
17. Test your Subscription!

Please post a comment if you have any questions or if you want me to clarify anything! Oh, and by the way, if any of you managed to configure this from the console, please drop a comment as well! 😛

So you’ve installed Service Manager and the SSP, you’ve added the language pack for your language and you’ve enabled that language for the SSP itself – only to discover that the translations of the different texts are pretty poor. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the actual translation, but you would like to rephrase something or add a couple of lines somewhere.

(For those of you who want’s to know how to configure the SSP to function in another language, read this blogpost: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/02/14/how-to-select-the-portal-language-in-scsm-2012.aspx )

Here’s how you change the texts:

1. Log on to your Web Content server.
2. Go to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\System Center Service Manager Portal\ContentHost\Clientbin and locate the folder for the language which you want to edit the texts.
   
3. In this folder there should be a file called SilverlightModule_StringResources.SV.resx.xml (the language code will differ depending on the directory you’ve opened).
4. Open a text editor with admin rights (right click -> Run as administrator) and open the file. (Notepad works good for this but Notepad++ is awesome for editing these kind of files.)
5. Locate and change the texts as you desire.
6. Save the file.
7. Open a browser and go to the SSP and make sure that the corrected texts is visible. (If you had the SSP opened when doing this, you need to restart your browser)

Before editing the SilverlightModule_StringResources.SV.resx.xml

After editing the SilverlightModule_StringResources.SV.resx.xml

Note: This doesn’t seem to work for the original texts written in English even though there is an English directory (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\System Center Service Manager Portal\ContentHost\Clientbin\en).

Update 20/11-2012,
Please see this post: http://www.scsm.se/?p=986

In short: Memory issues seems to be resolved, yay 🙂

Here’s the complete patch notes (copied from Microsoft):

• Memory leak in the Service Manager 2012 Console when opening/closing Incidents
• Service Manager 2012 Console crashes with an OutOfMemoryException because of form control objects rooted in the GC heap
• Portal: In portal if user changes sharepoint site language to Turkish, language invariant (English) language pack display strings are returned
• Poor Service Manager 2012 Console Performance when opening Incident Forms when the Console is open through Citrix

Read more and download UR3 here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34960