SCSM.SE

A short post containing some useful Service Manager 2016 related links.

Official Service Manager 2016 documentation:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center-docs/sm/service-manager

Read the System Center 2016 Release Notes here (Known Issues – do read this if you’re planning to use any SC 2016 product!):
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center-docs/get-started/release-notes

Download the Service Manager 2016 Authoring Tool here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54059

Download a fix for the HTML5 Portal if you’re doing an upgrade here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54060

Download the Operations Manager Management Pack for Service Manager 2016 here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44231

Also note that Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2016 has been release. However, UR1 does not contain any fixes for Service Manager 2016. Download and read more here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3190609

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.

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:

Higher work-item per second processing capacity
Service Manger can more easily handle a large inflow of 45 work items per minute.

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.

If you have an untrusted AD-connector that suddenly cannot connect anymore, after applying UR7 or later it could be due to an LDP connectivity issue.
In my case, the Operations Manager log on the workflow server logged the error: The specified domain does not exist or cannot be contacted.. each time the connector started.

DNS resolution of the domain name worked fine, and I could connect manually to a DC on port 389 using ldp.exe, from the workflow server.
However, because of the updates in the AD-connector done in UR7, SCSM is now also connecting to the DC on port 389/UDP instead of only 389/TCP.

So go to you network guy and ask him to open up for both TCP and UDP on port 389.

You can troubleshoot the LDAP connectivity yourself using this tool:
PortQryUI (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24009)