This week I have been working with notification in Service Manager. Some of my Service Manager customers need Swedish e-mail messages to one part of the company and for example English e-mail messages to another part of the company. To get that to work there are a number of steps to take. After configure e-mail notification channels (Administration/Notification/Channels) we need to configure a notification template. In the template we can configure different e-mail body and subject for different languages. In this post I will use one template, one for new incidents that the affected user will get when an incident is registered for them, you could configured a second one to notify affected user when an incident change status to closed.

I configured the first template with the following settings (Administration/Notification/Templates)

• Notification template name: Contoso Blog New Incident
• Targeted class: Incident
• Management Pack: Service Manager Incident Management Configuration Library (default)
• Message subject: A suitable message and property, I use WorkItem/Id (insert as property) to get the case ID
• Message body: A suitable message and properties. I use
  • WorkItem/Id
  • WorkItem/CreatedDate
  • WorkItem/Title
  • Incident/Classification
• Language: Swedish (Sweden)
• Switch to another language, in my scenario English (United States). Input a new message subject and message body. Then click OK to save your template

Now we have a notification template that supports two languages, in my example Swedish and English (United States). Next step is to configure a workflow to send notification. We can use the default incident event workflow configuration workflow for that (Administration/Workflows/Configuration). Add a workflow with the following settings

• Name: Contoso blog New Incident
• Description: E-mail notification to affected user when a new incident is registered
• Check for events: When an incident is created
• Management Pack: Service Manager Incident Management Configuration Library (default)
• Enabled: Checked
• On the Specify Event Criteria page, click Next
• On the Select Incident Template, do not apply a template, click Next
• On the Select People to Notify,
  • Enable notification
  • User: Affected User
  • Message template: Contoso Blog New Incident, click Add
• On the Summary page, click Next
• On the Completion page, click Create and Close

Now, If we register an incident for a English user and one for a Swedish user there will be a couple differences in the e-mail. First it will use different message body and subject as the users has different local settings on their user CI in Service Manager. As you can see we get a very strange value for the category in the Swedish e-mail. This will happen when the list value doesn’t have a display string in the language of the target recipient. The workflow will get the notification template that corresponds to that user´s locale property setting. Replace the list value display string given the user´s locale. Format the date and time values according to the users locale property and time zone. In this scenario the user Kurt has local property configured to Sweden (Swedish) so there is no default display string for Hardware Issues in Swedish. But for Ed it works out of the box as his locale property is configured to English (United States) which is provided out of the box.

If you need to update your users timezone and/or locale settings you could use the CSV connector. Travis has a good post about that here. I have a post about the CSV connector and importing knowledge here.

During my tests I found the following results when you mix user local property, notification template language and default display strings

What we need to do to get correct e-mail bodies for Swedish affected users is to add localization in the Service Manager Incident Management Configuration Library management pack. We need to configure the management pack to support Swedish. Travis has a good blog post about this here. General steps are

1. Export the Incident Management Configuration management pack
2. Open it with XML Notepad
3. Add languagepack and localization display strings for your language<
4. Save the management pack
5. Import it into Service Manager again

If we now register a incident for a English (United States) user and one for a Swedish (Sweden) user they will get one e-mail each, from the same notification template, but with different values for the list properties. In this case the incident category parameter will be translated to different words.

To summarize this post I would say that notification in Service Manager is a key feature that everyone will use. It support multiple-language templates and there are workflows and wizards to help you. But! Remember to plan the user CI local setting, language of your notification template and language of your display string

In this post I wrote about how-to import knowledge into Service Manager 2010. This week I did some tests about importing knowledge including data from a word file (docx) and a rich text format file (rtf). In my previous post about importing knowledge I wrote how you could use files and how they are mapped to the knowledge article text fields. If I use a Word file (docx) the result is “raw data”, not how we see the same file in Word.

 

If I instead use a Rich Text form file it looks really nice in the Service Manager console.

Summary: Try to use rich text format files instead of normal Word files when importing knowledge into Service Manager.

This week I have tested to import knowledge into Service Manager. Knowledge can be used for example as guides in the self service portal for end-users, system documentation for engineers or troubleshooting guides for service desk personnel. One of the ways to get knowledge into Service Manager is to use the CSV import feature. The CSV import feature allows you to bulk-import instances of any class type or projection type defined in the Service Manager Configuration Management Database (SMCMDB). More info about CSV import here.

I started to map the labels on the knowledge form with properties of the knowledge class. When you use the CSV import feature you have one XML file with the properties that you will write data to and in which order they are, then you have a CSV file with the data itself.

There are a couple of fields where you cant use normal display values, for example the status property, when you import knowledge articles you cant use “Draft” you will have to use “10F171DF-3AB1-648D-D151-D83A5171DD7B” in the CSV file. That is because the knowledge form use StringIds then there is a “translation table” in the database to translate the string into the correct work and language. So how do you get hold of these values?
They are all in the LocalizedText table in the Service Manager database. For example to get the StringID for draft status you can run the following query

SELECT [LTStringId]
,[LanguageCode]
,[LTStringType]
,[ManagementPackId]
,[ElementName]
,[MPElementId]
,[SubElementName]
,[LTValue]
,[TimeAdded]
,[LastModified]
,[DisplayStringId]
FROM [ServiceManager].[dbo].[LocalizedText] WHERE ElementName LIKE '%knowledge%status%draft%'

It will give you a result like this

As you can see there are different values for different languages. When you need to get StringIds for your values you will need to check in this table. During my test I found that you need to do this for status, tag and category.

There are two other intresting properties,  AnalystContent and EndUserContent. When you use these two with the CSV import feature is looking for files in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center\Service Manager 2010 folder (default path). The content in these two files will be uploaded to the corresponding text field in the knowledge article form.

 
The following is a example of a CSV file and a XML file I used to import a knowledge article. If you save them to a folder and import them into Service Manager you will get a new knowledge article with some guidelines in each text field, so you easy can identify where to put your text.

10F171DF-3AB1-648D-D151-D83A5171DD7B,
F982E5B1-7864-7FC5-D0A4-8E000C91C241,75F786E2-CAA7-E7E9-47A0-BCC714BF1EDF,ArticleOwner,Comments,
CreatedBy,VendorArticleID,Title,Abstract,keyword,,
ExternalURLSource,http://www.contoso.se,
comment01.txt,comment02.txt

and the XML file used with the CSV file

Travis Wright in the Service Manager product team has written a good post with more info about this.