Since a couple of days back the whole System Center 2016 suite, including Service Manager, is now available on MSDN and MVLS. The new version of Service Manager includes:
- Performance improvements
- Faster SCCM and Active Directory connector sync with disabling ECL logging
- Grooming improvements for ECL logs
- Reduction in incident workflow lag
- Integrated ADGroupExpansion Workflow into ADConnector
- New Date dimensions in Data Warehouse cubes
- New HTML based Self Service portal
- Spell check in SM console
- Open activity in progress
- Support for Lync 2013 and Skype for Business
- Setup changes to support SQL AlwaysOn installation
- Support for .NET Framework 4.5.1
- Support for Windows Server 2016
- Support for SQL Server 2016
Read more here.
The list is certainly not as long as we wish it would have been, but some fixes, especially the Performance Improvements, are really important. Here’s some numbers from Microsoft to display the performance improvements:
Improved work-item creation and update commit performance
Time to create and update work items was greatly reduced using this improvement.
Action | SM2012R2 | SM2016 | Improvement |
---|---|---|---|
Incident creation time | 2 – 6 seconds | 0.5 seconds | 4 times |
Incident creation time during connector sync | 8 – 10 seconds | Less than 1 second | 8 times |
Improved workflow processing
Workflows in Service Manager should have less latency and should catch up faster when you do experience latency.
Here are the times for workflows to catch up after 2 hours of latency at a 45 work item per minute rate:
Action | SM2012R2 | SM2016 | Improvement |
---|---|---|---|
Workflow catch-up time | 2 hours 50 mins | 1 hour 46 mins | 1.5 times |
Higher work-item per second processing capacity
Service Manger can more easily handle a large inflow of 45 work items per minute.
Action | SM2012R2 | SM2016 | Improvement |
---|---|---|---|
Average incident creation time | 2.2 seconds | 0.5 seconds | 4 times |
As you can see by looking at the numbers, the improvements made has really made an impact, and I can honestly say that I was blown away by speed of the console while trying SCSM 2016 in my lab. Hopefully the improvements will be this noticeable in all production environments as well, once people manage to upgrade.
Also, a couple of things has been deprecated and is no longer supported:
- The Silverlight based Self Service Portal
- The IT GRC Process Pack
- The CSSP, Cloud Service Process Pack
Read more here.