Service Catalog and the New Self-Service Portal

Before we look at the new Self-Service Portal we need to understand the Service Catalog. The Service Catalog is made up of two main parts Service Offerings and Requests Offerings. Service Offerings are user facing catalog items that describe and IT Service that you provide. Service Offerings contain a set of specific services inside the IT service that the users can request known as Request offerings. Request offerings contain a set of questions that the user can answer in order to create a Service Request or Incident. You can find the Service Catalog in the Library section in the Service Manager Console.

The Service Catalog is presented to the end user through the New Self Service Portal hosted in SharePoint 2010. On the Main Page of the Self-Service Portal you will see a selection of Service Offerings to choose from.

If you click on one of the Service Offerings you will see a list of all the request offerings that are listed inside.

If you click on a Request Offering you will be sent to a screen with help articles related to the request offering and a go to request form button. If you click on the go to request form you will be prompted with a request form that is created during the creation of a request offering.

Once the user has submitted a request they can click the my request button on the quick navigation and see all the Incidents and Service Requests they have created.

If they click the My Activities button they will see all of the activities they have assigned to them through Incidents and Service Requests.

New Connectors

There are two new connectors in System Center Service Manger 2012. The first is the System Center Orchestrator connector. This connector will allow you to import Orchestrator run books into Service Manager. Once you have them imported you can create Runbook Activity Templates. The Paramater Mapping section of the Template will import the paramaters from the Initialize Data activity at the begining of your run book.

You can use the Self-Service Portal questions to populate the Parameters in the Runbook Template and have full automation of Request offerings. For example if you created a Request offering for Create a New User the requestor would fill out a form on the Self-Service Portal that would then kick of the Runbook activity. This process would automatically create the Active Directory user, Exchange Mail box and Lync account then e-mail the information to the appropriate people. You can see how Service Manager and Orchestrator working together is a very powerful tool.

The second connector is the Virtual Machine Manager Connector. The VMM connector imports the Clouds and VM templates you can also use these when creating service offerings. This will come in handy if you want to do things like automate Virtual Machine Deployment.

Cubes and Reporting

Service Manager has added prebuilt OLAP Cubes to service Manager 2012. These will allow you to export the data to excel and create pivot tables. You can also use the Performance Point Service in SharePoint to create reporting dashboards!

Service Requests

Service Requests are used by Request Offerings when a user makes a standard request within and IT service. The Service Request form will often be used when users are filling out forms from the Self-Service Portal.

Now lets take a look at the Service Request form. On the general tab you have the basic information about the request. You will notice a User Input section this will contain the information submitted by the user from the Self-Service Portal.

The next tab is the activities tab here you can put the different activities involved in completing the service request. Service Manager 2012 has also added the ability to have parallel activities so you can have multiple activities happening at the same time.

Service Level Agreement Support

Service Manager now has a much more robust Service Level Management feature.

The Service Level Objective hours are now controlled by a calendar this allows you to add specific hours, days and holidays that are not counted against your SLO.

Service Level Objectives now use Queues this allows you to have them apply based of any of the available properties in the class you chose. You can then set you target time and warning based taking into account your calendar.

Parallel Activities

The activities tab in Change and Service Requests now have a tree view. This allows you to have parallel activities so can have multiple actives occur at once.

Release Management

SCSM 2012 has also added the Release Management feature. A Release Record will be a related item to a Change request and is used to track a specific release.

In the example below I want to pass on the $department value and the $username value.

To Publish the data the first thing you need to do is click the Publish Data tab then click the Add.. button.

In the name sections put the name that you would like to use for the Data you are going to publish. In the type put the Type of data that you are going to publish. In the Variable name put the PowerShell variable that you want to pass along. Do not include the $ from the PowerShell variable. In the example below I am passing the department variable.

Now in any activity after your .net you will be able to subscribe to the Published Data you created.

When Office 365 was released to the public last June it was arguably missing a few pieces required of a serious contender in the content mangagement space. We’ve believed that many of these limitations would be lifted as the service matures. That’s exactly what’s been happening – for example, last December the Business Connectivity Service (BCS) feature-set was added. Now that storage pricing has been dramatically reduced SharePoint in the cloud is much more compelling as an alternative to on-premise solutions.

Now that you have your Business Intelligence site created go to the main page. On the main page click on Data Connections link in the quick navigation.

On the data connections page click the documents tab in the ribbon. From the ribbon select new document then PerformancePoint Data Source. This will open the Dashboard Designer.

Next you will be asked to select a Data Source Template. Select Analysis Services.

Next you will be asked to enter the information for your data connection. In the server field select the SQL server that has your analysis services databases. In the database section select the DWASDatabase. Next in the cube section select the cube you want to use. For this blog I will select the work items cube since I am going to be creating some reports around incidents. Nest click the test data source button and make sure you get the connection successful. Then save and close dashboard designer.

Now that we have our data connection we need to select the list where we will be storing our reports. To do this click the Add Lists button in the ribbon. Next select your Business Intelligence site then select the PerformancePoint Content list.

Next right click on the PerformancePoint Content list select new then report.

On the next page you will be asked to select a template for this example lets select Analytic Grid.

Now you can easily create a grid creating the information you want by dragging the measures and dimensions into the rows and columns. In the example below I created a report showing SLO status based off of incident classification.

After you have created the report you can easily change its type by right clicking on the chart and selecting a new report type. In the example below I have change my grid into a pie chart.

Now we need to create a new page on our Service Manager portal to display the reports. To do this go to your Service Manager main page and select site actions in the top left corner. Next click new page select a name for your page and click create.

Now we need to add some PerformancePoint web parts to add the reports to your page. On your new page  click site actions then edit page. Next click the insert tab on the ribbon and select web part. Now click the PerformancePoint folder in the Categories menu the select PerformancePoint Report and click add.

Now click the “Click here to open the tool pane” link in your new web part. On the tool pain select grid next to the location box and go to your Business Intelligence site and select the report that we just created.

You may get the following error.

To fix this error click the grid next to location again and select your report copy the text from location URL and past it into the location box.

You will now see the report on your page. The next step is to get the page into the quick navigation from your portal site to do this go to your portal page and select site actions site settings in the top left corner. In the site actions page select navigation under the Look and Feel section.

Scroll down to the Navigation editing and sorting selection. Now click on the home folder click add link add the title for your page (this will show on the quick navigation bar) then put in the URL of the new page we just created.

Now if you go back to your Service Manager main page you will see your new site in the quick navigation.

If you click on the site in the quick nave you will now be on your page with your newly created reports!