A change calendar keeps everyone informed about when changes will be performed and also gives a overview of planned changes in the environment. We handle change requests as work items in Service Manager but there is no change calender out-of-the-box in Service Manager. In this blog post I will show how to build a change calender with a shared calender in Exchange, Service Manager and Orchestrator. The idea is what when a change request is created in Service Manager a appointment is created in a shared Exchange calender. Then all engineers can access that calender and see all planned changes in one view.

The first thing to create is the runbook. The runbook monitor Service Manager for new change request, when there is one, the runbook trigger and create the appointment in Exchange. The runbook is quite small as you can see in the image below.

I use the Exchange Users Integration Pack to create the appointment, download it here. The “Monitor New Change Request” activity is configure to trigger on all new objects of Change Request. The “Create Appointment” activity and the Exchange connector is configured according to the images below.

Below is a image of the result in the shared calender, that every engineer can see from Outlook

Done! It is a very quick and easy solution that will bring a lot of value for many organisations. But what if you want to add something manually? Then you can of course create a appointment manual in Outlook and invite the shared calender, but you could also build a service request and use the self service portal in Service Manager to add that. Include a runbook activity in the service request that create the appointment.

What if you need to delete or update a appointment? The Exchange User integration pack will publish a ID for the item you create, in this case a appointment. Write that ID back to the service request. Then you can create a runbook that monitor change requests for changes, for example status changed to cancelled, and trigger a runbook that delete or update the change request. If you then have the Exchange appointment ID stored on the change request in Service Manager it is easy to pick it up and update/delete the correct appointment, instead of trying to find the correct appointment based on title or start date. In the runbook below I have added a Update Object activity that writes the Exchange ID to the change request.