SPF provides a hosted IaaS cloud REST OData API for System Center adding multitenancy and the ability to manage across multiple System Center instances.  My colleague John Ballard wrote an introductory post on the Orchestrator blog about SPF here.

For a demo and overview discussion of SPF, here is a Channel 9 interview I did last week at TechEd North America.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032443671&Culture=en-US

The webcast is from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday May 26th.

You can download an evaluation copy here. 

It’s been a great experience working with the engineering team, TAP customers and ISV/SI partners on this project.  We have also gotten a lot of great feedback on the TechNet forum. 

Over the next year, there are more upcoming releases:

• Service Manager Authoring Tool in a couple of months
• Compliance & Risk MP in August
• Service Manager 2010 SP1 in early 2011

Updated:  added better evaluation download link

I thought I would provide some of the details that will be relevant for folks interested in this integration. 

With this bi-directional connector, you can choose to have alerts closed when incidents are resolved/closed and incidents resolved when alerts are closed. 

In addition, you will often want to know when updates to OM alerts will happen due to the connector as many orgs have implemented OM-based email notification subscriptions that will trigger on any changes to the alerts.

When is OM Alert History is Modified?

• When Alert is first forwarded to SM
• When Alert is assigned to a user in SM
• When Alert is closed

What other Alert properties are updated from SM?

• Ticket ID
• Resolution status
• Alert Owner (SM Assigned to User)
• Resolved By
• Resolved Date

Also, I am sure you will be interested in knowing what data flows from OM to SM in the alert.

Which Alert Properties are mapped to SM Incident?

• Incident ID (initially set upon creation)
• All Custom fields
• Resolution Status
• Assigned to User (OM Alert Owner)
• Affected Config Items including Computer (OM Monitoring Object)
• Description

If there is a conflict due to changes at the same time in both SM and OM on the same incident/alert pair:

• If incident is resolved in SM at the same time an update happens for the OM alert and the alert is not closed, the alert will be closed and the updates are applied to  the incident.
• If alert is closed in OM and incident has updates in SM, the incident updates are applied to the alert. However the alert will not be reactivated and the incident will be resolved.

Finally, the OM alert connector is also able to route incidents using a rule that applies a custom incident template based on criteria such as the OM MP containing the Rule/Monitor that raised the alert, computer group, custom field, OM monitoring class, or alert severity & priority. 

Each routing rule will be evaluated in priority order from top to bottom and if none of the rules apply, you can pick a default template to use.

It fixes an issue that occurs with Data Access Service (sdk service) or the Management Service (healthservice) when either SM or DWStagingandConfig database servers become temporarily unavailable.

If you don’t install the fix, you will see event ID: 26340 in the Event log of the management server when the problem occurs.

You can download Beta 2 along with the first Beta of the Service Manager Authoring tool from the Connect website at http://connect.microsoft.com

I’ll start doing a series of posts around this release over the next few weeks and so will my teammates on the Service Manager blog.

In advance of the Beta 2 release, folks from the team are starting to post demo videos on TechNet Edge.

There is one on Managing Applications with Service Maps, and a few are starting to come out about the Self-service User Portal.

More will follow soon…

We have a Service Manager Test Drive preview of Beta 2 available to try out now.  It’s on hosted VMs, so all you need to do is log in with your Windows Live ID and start playing with it.

The VMs have all of the same sample data we used in our demonstrations at the Microsoft Management Summit.  You will be able to evaluate the core Incident, Change, and Configuration Management features, as well as integration with Active Directory, System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operations Manager.  There is also some sample data for a few reports available in the Test Drive.

Please check it out and let us know what you think – you can post feedback and questions in the Service Manager TechNet forum.

We are having a breakout session on Service Manager integration with other systems, including many demos of how SvcMgr integrates with Active Directory, Exchange, and System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Operations Manager.

SO22: Using Service Manager to Achieve Process Integration Across System Center

Thursday 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM, Veronese 2405 

Speaker(s): Charlie Chase, Marc Umeno

Track(s): Operations Management

Session Type: Breakout Session

Products(s): Operations Manager 2007, Service Manager

A technical drill-down on the integration features of Service Manager: This session will explain how Service Manager consolidates configuration item information between Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Active Directory. It will demonstrate the integration of incident and change management with Operations Manager through auto-ticketing of alerts and the integration with Configuration Manager with auto-ticketing via Desired Configuration Management (DCM).

http://blogs.technet.com/servicemanager/archive/2009/02/27/the-system-center-platform-in-service-manager-part-3-the-data-access-service.aspx