ServiceMap 2.0
What is ServiceMap?
Microsoft Servicemap is a designer tool that facilitates MOF Consultant to represent an IT infrastructure of customer's organization in a diagramatic manner.
Why ServiceMap?
To answer this question, one should know the broad history of ServiceMap.
Under WWService, 'Support & Health' is one among the ServiceLines. It provides various offereing and one among them is 'IT Service Mapping'. IT Service Mapping (SMAP) is designed to help IT and business unit groups define and evaluate Services for their organization. Service Mapping allows customers to ensure that all dependencies and cross functional areas are captured and accountability identified. The SMAP engagement will be conducted by specialized Microsoft consultants who will team with the customer’s IT organization. The engagement consists of Process and Technology work streams that will include whiteboard design and planning sessions as well as actual tool implementation, conducted over a period of approximately two weeks.
Early times, consultant used to represent the IT Infra of an org using Microsoft Visio as a drawing platform. The MOF consultants are usually come from Infra background and possess strong expertise on MOF & ITIL. Using Visio for this purpose were'nt very easier to accomplish the task. Also, this excercise spans 1-2 week and usually the Consultant on-job has to meet & team with various groups head in the customer's IT division. Hence required a need / domain specific tool which will consume less time and more convenient & user friendly to diagramatically represent it. Also to note is, this tool and the tool's output is leave-behind deliverable at customer's place for their future use.
ServiceMap tool at its version 1.0 was an add-in model to Visio. Installing this add-in will copy required tempaltes, stencils and additional command handling logics to Visio and MOF consultant used this to prepare Smaps. These maps are usually large and complex depending on the IT infrastructure size and topology of the customer. What is lacking on this version is usability & extensibitity. Challenges were adding more features and making creation / maintenance of smap more user friendly.
ServiceMap's current version 2.0 is a custom windows-based desktop application which provides designer surface to create / modify servicemaps. Technology bedind is using the drawing capabilities of Visio, providing rich user experiance and adding further capabilities required for the tool which are part of Functional Spec for v2.0 and also to incorporate feedbacks that comes from the users in the field. Cautious technology decision made analyzing various pros & cons and looking into various alternatives. This application is basically an Office automation which uses Visio ActiveX drawing control as the underlying canvas - this serves as surface of the map.
This is the solution on which I work on. This is what I own today!