Everyone working with the System Center product suite has most likely read one of the “Unleashed” books. In many forums they have been described as a technical ”bible.” We are pleased to announce there will be a new “bible” for Service Manager 2010!
Service Manager, the long-awaited third major component of Microsoft’s System Center suite, addresses the “Supporting” quadrant of the MOF process model. System Center Service Manager 2010 Unleashed will provide in-depth reference and technical information about Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010, as well as information on other products and technologies on which its features and components are dependant.

The content uses an end-to-end feature implementation perspective, facilitating more optimized deployments by covering related topics in a stepwise order for a given feature area. The book begins with an overview, moves into planning, design, and implementation, and then covers the most important and significant feature sets of the product – of interest to SCSM administrators worldwide.

Authors are Kerrie Meyler, Alexandre Verkinderen, Anders Bengtsson, David Pultorak, and Patrik Sundqvist. Also contributing are Travis Wright, Kurt Van Hoecke, and Maarten Goet.

Here are some of the topics we plan to cover:

• Service Manager Basics
• Service Manager 2010 Overview
• MOF & ITIL (Why You Care)
• Looking Inside Service Manager
• Designing Service Manager
• Planning Complex Configurations
• Installing Service Manager 2010
• Using the Service Manager Console
• Connecting to Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, and Active Directory
• Business Services
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Release Management Services
• IT Management – Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance
• Using the Self-Service Portal
• Notification
• Service Manager and Security
• Backup, Recovery, and Maintenance
• Customization Planning
• Customizing Workflows and Management Packs
• Reports, Dashboards, and Data Analysis
• Customizing the Data Warehouse and Reporting
• Service Manager and the Managed Service Provider
• Partner Solutions

Service Manager 2010 Unleashed will be published by Sams Publishing, joining the existing System Center series with Unleashed books on Operations Manager and Configuration Manager. The book will incorporate Service Manager 2010 SP1 as well as enhancements in an anticipated R2 release in 2011.
I’m very proud to be working on this book and I would like to thank Kerrie Meyler for asking me to join the project.

This week Microsoft Learning released a new Operations Manager 2007 R2 instructor-led (classroom) course for IT Professionals. It is a 3-days course that will cover the following topics in deep, level 400.

 This course was written by myself and Maarten Goet. Maarten is also a Microsoft MVP within Operations Manager. We have tried to add as much “real world scenarios” and field experience as possible into this course and hope you will learn a lot!

Module 1: Architecture and Troubleshooting
This module will explain how the ‘internals’ of Operations Manager work and how to troubleshoot

Module 2: Management Packs
This module will explain management pack architecture and how to author a management pack.

Module 3: Reporting
This module will explain how to develop custom reports.

Module 4: Connectors
This module will explain how to connect Operations Manager to remote systems, like a ticketing system.

Module 5: Advanced Scripting and PowerShell
This module will explain how to build and work with Operations Manager scripting and PowerShell.

For more info about the course, please take a look here. If you want to attend this course in the the Nordic countries, please take a look here.

Try System Center Service Manager in a free online lab environment at http://www.microsoftservicemanagertestdrive.com/

The scenarios in the lab will demonstrate an overview of a Microsoft System Center Service Manager installation and initial configuration, covering the following topics:

 *Installing Service Manager
*Importing data from Active Directory,System Center Configuration Manager, and data and alerts from Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and above
*Configuring User Roles within Service Manager
*Manually adding users that were not imported from Active Directory’
*Creating several templates, configuring initial parameters, creating queues, lists, and groups, and then creating a management pack to save any custom objects
*Installing Service Manager in a production environment in a scenario where Service Manager is installed on four computers