Bloggy Bloggy Bloggy Oi! Oi! Oi!
Right then. A blog. First post - Hmm, Better write something......mind's gone blank....nothing new there then. Ok, I'm ready...Go!
False Start....right try again? Start with what though? Arggh am I just contributing to lots of other inane stuff out there? Right - got off track, start again. This is isn't going well.
Hello poor unfortunate who has arrived at this place - sorry nothing good here yet. !!$#&*>? Done it again haven't I? - Got off track, Ok let's start with a nice heading. No, this is even worse I'm talking to myself on my own new blog???? Whaaat?
Introduction?
Hi I'm Jon Sabberton, a Senior Consultant in MCS based out of Dubai in the UAE. (Now I'm an American talk show host! arrgghhh) . Ok so what I'm hoping to do in these ramblings is hopefully give out some information that someone somewhere will actually find of some use. Initially I'm not sure I'm going to give you anything mindblowingly special or make you go oooooooo, but hopefully you'll check back now and again to see what's going on.
Ok I'm going to try and write something vaguely techie-like now. So for you non techie types (Hello Mum and Dad!, Hello Mrs S) best leave now as that's the interesting stuff done with as I'm going to attempt some geeking:
System Center Service Manager 2010
Every now and then a product comes along that blows my mind. This is one of them. So I thought I'd just give out a couple of very high level pointers on this to get you started thinking about what you need if you're considering putting this in
Pointer one: It works really well if you have - Active Directory, Configuration Manager and Operations Manager in your environment (note to self and reader <singular> this doesn't mean it doesn't work well if you don't have all three - you just get less information to work with)
Pointer two: Clean up your Active Directory of all stale objects like Computer accounts and User accounts that are old and don't need to be there.
Pointer three: A little bit like the above but.... with Configuration Manager - give it a nice spring clean - make sure it's happy and give it a bit lovin' - make all those services show green in the status node....and I don't mean by cheating and resetting all the statuses so they appear Green only to give you warnings and errors a few minutes later - really get them sorted.
Pointer four: Guess what? The same with Operations Manager....this one is more tricky - particularly those of you (and I know that you're there) that think that a happy Operations Manager is when the console is closed and you can't see those alerts waiting for you because if your console is closed there's nothing wrong right?.......Now is the time to sort those alerts out and get tuning those management packs so you're getting the alerts you want to see - If you don't they'll only come and haunt you in Service Manager...and then the entire helpdesk and your management team can see what you're not dealing with.
Pointer Five: This is a biggy. In Service Manager we want to map your processes and procedures into Service Manager workflows. We can't do this if you haven't defined Incident Management or Change Management in your organisation. If we have no idea how your organisation handles and incident or a change how can we map it? So get some Operations Consulting - get all your processes these mapped using an ITIL or MOF specialist (note to reader - I orginially had a MOF joke here......removed due to taste and decency and primarily because my Mum is reading this - Hello Mum) - this may take some time. :0)
Pointer Six: Once this is done we're good to go. The minimum, weeniest deployment of Service Manager needs 2 servers! Yes TWO as in the answer to 1+1 or 10 in binary (oooh technical). The first server is for Service Manager Console and Workflows and all the good Stuff, the second is for the Datawarehouse server, these cannot co-exist...This is by design.
Outro
OK, this typing about stuff is exhausting and is making me think - something the pea rolling around in my skull isn't really used to. I think this will do for my first effort. If you've read this far thanks very much and hopefully it wasn't too useless - At some point I'll make it look nice. I'll be back soon with some more inane ramblings but for now......My Name's Jon Sabberton, thankyou and Goodnight.(roll credits - cue applause?)
Cheers
Sabbs
Bloggy! Oi!