Service Manager 2010 is without a doubt the most customizable and extensible product in
the System Center suite. The ability to customize and extend the product is enabled by
the common technology platform born in Operations Manager that now underlies other
Microsoft products such as System Center Essentials, Windows InTune, Virtual Machine
Manager, and now Service Manager. The platform was substantially extended in the
Service Manager 2010 development lifecycle to meet the requirements of an IT service
management product. Thus, while Service Manager 2010 itself is a first generation
product, the core platform is fifth generation, preceded by MOM 2000, MOM 2005,
Operations Manager 2007, and Operations Manager 2007 R2. This book is all about how
to harness the power of that rich platform and unleash Service Manager.
In the past four years, I have visited with many customers and heard the requirements of
many others by speaking with our implementation partners. One requirement is universal—
customizability! Some customers will use Service Manager for incident management.
Other will use it just for change or configuration management. One thing for certain: No
two customers have the same processes, the data storage requirements, or regulations. No
one uses Service Manager as is out of the box without substantial modification.
When I first joined the product team, there was a debate whether Service Manager was a
platform or a set of solutions—configuration, incident, change, and problem management.
Knowing every customer was different; the platform proponents wanted to spend
most of our time building a highly customizable platform and very little time providing
for solutions out of the box. The solutions proponents felt we just needed to build a
product with lots of features designed around ITIL or MOF best practices. The reality—
we needed to do both! We needed to provide immediate value out of the box to enable
customers to adopt ITIL and MOF, but also needed to be adaptable to match the
customers’ processes and configuration management database (CMDB) data storage
requirements.