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System Center Service Manager Vision and Planned Capabilities Whitepaper

The Service Desk function is the primary point of contact between end users and the IT organization or service provider. Its primary goal is often described as to restore service to and to fulfill requests from users as quickly as possible. However, best practice suggests that the Service Desk be given a broader role beyond that of a traditional Help Desk, a role that spans the processes of incident, problem, change, and asset and configuration management. Organizations face three key challenges as they adopt this broader approach:

1) Traditional Service or Help Desk products and technologies are inflexible, requiring expensive and time consuming customizations that slow down the adoption of newer capabilities
2) Some products lack integration of Service Desk functionality into a broader set of IT management products and capabilities such as operational monitoring and automated configuration management
3) Still other products lack direct support for the adoption, integration and optimization of processes that are primarily driven by best practice frameworks such as Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and ITIL®.

System Center Service Manager, scheduled for release in early 2010, is being designed to help organizations deal effectively with each of these three challenges. This whitepaper outlines the vision for Service Manager and its planned capabilities.

Download the System Center Service Manager Vision and Planned Capabilities Whitepaper

You can download the Beta from Connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=2733&pageType=1&SiteID=446

Anders Bengtsson: Yesterday I attend at Michael Nappi session “System Center Service Manager Product Overview”. During this the roadmap of Service Manager was shown.

* 2008 H2, Beta 1 (early December or end of November, will not include the self-service IT portal)
* 2009 H1, Beta 2 (summer 2009, will include the self-service IT portal and will also be feature complete)
* 2009 H2, RC
* 2010 H1, RTM

We at Techlog reported earlier on the roadmap of Service Manager :

* Beta 1 Refresh at the end of 2008 calender year;
* Beta 2 Milestone — which will be feature complete — at the end of second quarter of 2009;
* RC Milestone end third or beginning fourth quarter of 2009;
* RTM at the first half of 2010 or sooner.

Seems like MS is still on schedule with System Center Service Manager.

Travis Wright and Michael Nappi, both from the Service Manager product team, gave a breakout session on Service Manager on the annual Microsoft Management Summit. They updated the audience with the new roadmap and spook about what is going on with the development. In a nutshell, they told the audience, they took the feedback from the original beta 1 release and re-architected the product from the ground up to deliver a high quality v1 product. These are the major changes:

Here are the first screenshots from this (NEW) build with again thanks to Techlog.org:

•  Service Manager: Architecture
•  Service Manager: Key Changes
•  Service Manager: Extending
•  Service Manager: Self Service Portal
•  Service Manager: Create Incident
•  Service Manager: New WPF-based UI
•  Service Manager: Routing Wizard
•  Service Manager: Incident Details
•  Service Manager: SCOM integration
•  Service Manager: DCM & SCCM integration

During the breakout session on Service Manager, at the Microsoft Management Summit, Michael Nappi — who is the Product Unit Manager for Service Manager — updated the audience with the roadmap for releasing Service Manager.

The delay in the release dates have been due to the fact that the Service Manager team learned from the previous Beta 1 release and took drastic decisions to deliver a high quality v1 product. While the product team has a more aggressive internal schedule, these are the publicly communicated delivery dates: