System Center Tech

There are many occasions when you will want to manage Service Manager configuration items or work items from within Runbooks in Orchestrator. Whilst the activities in the Service Manager integration pack make this task relatively easy, these activities are somewhat limited in the properties that can be managed. Unfortunately if you extend a class and add new properties, the only way you will be able to manipulate those properties using a runbook is using the Service Manager PowerShell CmdLets (SMLets). SMLets can be downloaded from Codeplex at
http://smlets.codeplex.com/
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I was recently working with a customer that had a requirement to be able to log an incident by what they called “Super Users” and select an “Affected Group” that must be kept up to date with the status of the incident. The primary driver behind this requirement was that an office manager could log an incident, select a group of users that contained all the users from the selected office and then all users in that office would be kept up to date with updates to the incident.

There were a couple of challenges with this requirement, firstly, when a user logs an incident from the portal, they become the “Affected User” and there is no default way to allow the user to select an additional affected group of users. Secondly, notifications are only delivered to related users ie Affected User or Primary Owner. So there were a few things that we had to do so that we could make this solution work, the below list explains these as a high level:

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