Adding an ID or auto incrementing property to default classes

Posted on 06/03/2013 by

We have lots of Service Manager customers that have comprehensive CMDBs where they store all kind of object types and relationships. When defining your very own classes you know that every class should have a key property. Often this is property is called something like “ID” and will contain an auto incrementing value, e.g. “Car1”, “Car2” etc. so that you don’t have to take care about setting a unique value for every instance. Default classes also have key properties, but not always a real ID. The windows computer class uses the computer principal name as a key property. This can be confusing when you re-install computers or re-use computer names – this is especially confusing when accounting comes into play. So why not having an auto incrementing ID property there too to uniquely identify assets over time?

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Posted in Classes and Relations, Managing Objects | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Documentation of SCSM Relationship Classes

Posted on 10/02/2013 by

When you are dealing with Service Manager or especially CMDB’s you know that it’s all about relationships. Service Manager delivers tons of different relationships between object classes that will help you to build the relationships to reflect your needs. Of course, most of the time these relationships are not enough and you need to add many additional relationships on your own. But you must know what relationships exist out of the box, what classes they relate together and how they work.

To make things easier I put together an excel spreadsheet that lists the most important (not all) relationships in Service Manager together with the following information:

  • Relationship Display Name and Internal Name
  • Source Class
  • Destination Class
  • Relationship Type
  • Management Pack information where the Relationship lives

Capture

You can download the file from my SkyDrive. Maybe I will update the spreadsheet over time. If not, feel free to download and update it on your own Smiley

Cheers
Marcel

Posted in Classes and Relations | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Linking Parent/Child Incidents together using Orchestrator

Posted on 06/02/2013 by

“How can I use SCORCH to link Parent Incidents with Child Incidents?” seems to be a common question that I get a lot. So I decided to write a quick post on this topic. In this example I will use two Incidents that will be linked together, but you can of course modify this basic procedure for your own need. The only requirements are that you have SCSM and SCORCH up and running together with the SCSM Integration Pack.

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Posted in Classes and Relations, Incidents | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Marcel@MVP Summit 2013

Posted on 05/02/2013 by

In two weeks I will attend the MVP Global Summit 2013 in Redmond and Bellevue/USA. For this event, Microsoft invites all MVPs worldwide (approx 4000) for a great week of learning, sharing and having fun! For me it’s a great opportunity to meet people that I’m connected with from all over the world in person. More information available here –> http://www.2013mvpsummit.com/.

Starting now, I accept orders for famous swiss chocolate Smiley

Cheers
Marcel

Posted in General, Non Technical | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Installing the SCSM SSP – Error executing Custom Action “CreateSharePointWebSite.F175D191_81C3_4A7D_A05B_6A250575B468”

Posted on 14/01/2013 by

I had this error today while installing a new SCSM SSP Server in my lab. At the end it was a pretty simple thing to fix, but it cost me some time to figure it out. Just wanted to share with you in case you run into the same thing.

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Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) – Part 3: Creating Views by using Snippet Templates

Posted on 09/01/2013 by

VSAE offers multiple options to create views. You could use the View template or an empty Management Pack Fragment template. For this example however, I decided to use a snippet template to demonstrate how this can be used to create your own templates for your needs. It is indeed very powerful and can save you lots of time for repetitive tasks.

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Posted in Classes and Relations, Layout, Views | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) – Part 2: Creating a Folder with a custom Image

Posted on 04/01/2013 by

In part 2 of this VSAE series I will demonstrate how to create folders with custom images to the Management Pack to have a container ready for creating views later on. Make sure you take a look at the other parts too as I will not go into some details again.

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Posted in Classes and Relations, Layout | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments