When I first heard that Microsoft was going to release a “Service Desk” product, I was actually kind of excited. I heard about it at MMS in 2006 (I think) and the things that they were planning for their Service Desk product sounded really useful and even a bit forward thinking. Evidently, what they intended and what they built, wasn’t even close to what the customers wanted, because they scrapped it and started over completely.
Now they are once again trying to get feedback on a Beta version of System Center Service Manager. We aren’t participating in the Beta this time (too much other stuff going on) so I haven’t kept up with what is happening, but here is a reply to a question someone had about the Service Manager Roadmap:
Thanks very much for your interest in Service Manager – this is great feedback for our team. We will be adding many features into Beta 2, including OpsMgr integration, Service Maps, Reporting, Self-Service Portal, Knowledge Management, and Problem Management. We are making infrastruture improvements that will enhance scalability and performance. We are making usability improvements that will provide a better overall user experience. We are also going to be providing a tool that will enable form customization, object model extensions, and IT process workflow authoring.
I’ll try to answer some of your other questions below.
1. We don’t have plans today for a SCE connector.
2. We don’t have plans to have built-in integration with DPM – I would love to hear more details on how you think Service Manager could add value. A step-by-step example would be most helpful 🙂
3. We don’t have plans to directly control task execution in OpsMgr using Change Management workflows, although I believe the underlying Service Manager platform would support many scenarios. We do have plans to launch the OpsMgr web console from the Service Manager console (on the same machine) — then you can run these tasks from the OpsMgr web console.
4. We are not going to have the ability to prevent changes from being applied using the Service Manager change management feature, however we are evaluating functionality to incorporate change windows at a future date.