[Re-blog of the original post on the , which ran April 19th-23rd in Las Vegas, was voted by its attendees (up 51% over last year) as one of the most successful conferences of the series! Many thanks to all who attended, and to our sponsors (including our platinum sponsors Dell, Hitachi and HP), for making this event such a success! To kick off day .. more »

A question that has been discussed eagerly on forums regarding Service Manager 2010 is how to be able to take action upon incidents breaching their Service Level Agreement (SLA). In this post Patrik Sundqvist and I will show you one way to do it. There are three goals of this blog post: How to Configure Incident SLAs in Service Manager When an .. more »

We often hear questions either on the internal alias or from customers about SCVMM and Domain Controllers so here are a few of the common scenarios and questions and the real world answers: Answer: Yes.  Add the member server through the Add Host wizard using the option for 'perimeter network' and SCVMM can manage this host. Answer: Yes.  Joining th.. more »

This information is actually part of a KB article that recently got the OK for publishing but since it might take a day or so to show up I thought I'd throw the meat of it out here. Note that when it does go live you should be able to find the complete article It is a common request to have a way to be prompted during an Operating System Deployment .. more »

Just a quick heads up on a new Knowledge Base article we published recently: Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server virtual machines display an Operating System property of 'Unknown.' If the Operating System property is set manually, it will revert to 'Unknown' following an automatic SCVMM refresh. There are no errors associated with this change. .. more »

This question comes up fairly often – “How do I route incidents submitted by email?” This usually has two variations: 1) Based on who is sending the email I need to route it differently. For example, if the email is sent from Al Young I need to route the incident to a certain support team. If the incident is sent from somebody else I need to route .. more »

The Service Manager team is very pleased to announce the availability of Service Manager Authoring Tool Beta-2 This release is compatible with Service Manager 2010  RTM and contains a number of improvements and new features, including : Support for additional controls in form customization Additional activities in the workflow activity library C.. more »

Did you know that you can use the to quickly find VMM-related content in the TechNet Library? Tags have been added to all of the topics in the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and VMM 2008 R2 Here is a current picture of the tag cloud if you click Every topic has the common top-level tags . It gets more specific from there. As you drill .. more »

The Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) participants have had access to some additional training/ramp up materials to help them get started as quickly as possible. The RDP allowed customers and partners met 1x /week for 10 weeks and covered a bunch of topics that were designed to help them go from zero knowledge of Service Manager to a complete .. more »

Many of you have probably encountered or have been reading their blogs ( ) about Service Manager. They are seriously some of the most helpful and influential people in the SCSM community. Their day job is working as consultants at They have been working for a few months now on an end user facing self-service portal built on top of Service Manager .. more »

Consider the following scenario: You have a site server that is running System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2). You have some third-party volume shadow copy service (VSS) providers installed on the site server. In this scenario, the Backup ConfigMgr Site Server task of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 .. more »

We are pleased to let you know about a new style of courseware available for Configuration Manager.  This course will take you down the path of understanding how Configuration Manager 2007 can be used to perform common tasks such as Operating System deployment, software distribution and update, asset tracking and intelligence, client health r.. more »

Looks like our doc writing team has been hard at work updating the System Center Configuration Manager library this month: The Configuration Manager documentation library (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680651.aspx) has been updated on the Web and the latest content on the Web has Updated: April 1, 2010 at the top of the topic. .. more »

The Configuration Manager 2007 Toolkit V2 contains 11 downloadable tools to help you manage and troubleshoot Configuration Manager 2007. The following list provides specific information about each tool in the toolkit. - A tool that helps you troubleshoot issues related to software distribution, inventory, and software metering on Configuration .. more »

Now that we're back from this year's  , let me provide some pointers to updated collateral which will hopefully serve as useful reference material.  In addition to our website's Cloud computing infrastructure  , here is a high level that discusses our thinking on how cloud computing impacts the future of operations and management. We believe manag.. more »

Even though energy-saving hardware has been around for a while, statistics show that organizations don’t often get the most benefit from these capabilities. In fact, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, less than 10 percent of all enterprise PCs in use has their power management capabilities turned on. Why? Because users often di.. more »

Services if you don’t need them for your lab or evaluation. 2) Don’t run the Service Manager console maximized. For some reason this kicks in hardware acceleration in the guest OS which actually slows down performance when running in a VM. 3) Change the desktop background to a solid color – that should help with the painting latency over the .. more »

Our out of the box views contain a few views like “Change Requests: Assigned to Me”, “Activities Assigned to Me”, “My Incidents” etc. These views only display objects where the criteria match the current user. You can update these views or create new views where you would want the criteria to match the current user or a group the current user.. more »

[Today's post is provided by the The Configuration Manager documentation library ( ) has been updated on the Web and the latest content on the Web has at the top of the topic. Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 Release Notes are updated to clarify which versions of 64-bit Windows Server 2008 are subject to a known issue when using WAIK 2.0 for .. more »

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Toolkit V2 went live on the Microsoft Download Center.  This release is a follow up to our original release back in 2007.  With this V2 release we re-introduced the Tools from the SMS 2003 Toolkit.   All four tools where frequently requested from our customers and we are happy to enable them for use with Conf.. more »