Microsoft has setup a Virtual Test Drive, or Hand On Lab, for Service Manager. You can access it through a browser at http://www.microsoftservicemanagertestdrive.com/ and save state so you can come back where you left off later. The virtual environment has hosted VMs for System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration Manager so you can evaluate the integration between all of these System Center products.

The version of Service Manager hosted in this virtual environment is the "CTP2" version which has only been released to TAP customers/partners until now.  You can provide feedback to the Product Group on the Service Manager Forum.

New features for the CTP2 release include:

  • Operations Manager integration (CI Connector, Alerts to Incidents, Distributed Applications to Service Maps)
  • Link back to OM web console for diagnosis resolution using alert view, knowledge, tasks, and health explorer
  • Role-based security and user experience
  • Knowledge management and full-text search
  • New setup with consistent System Center experience
  • New Data Warehouse/Reporting infrastructure capabilities
  • PowerShell administration cmdlets
  • Reports runnable from within Service Manager console
  • More reports (Incident Resolution, Incidents by Analyst)
  • Change request workflows & activity templates
  • Activity management
  • Inbound email to incident creation
  • CSV Import
  • Database grooming

 

The scenarios in the lab demonstrate an overview of a Microsoft System Center Service Manager installation and initial configuration, covering the following topics:

  • Installing Service Manager
  • Importing data from Active Directory,System Center Configuration Manager, and data and alerts from Operations Manager 2007 SP1 and above
  • Configuring User Roles within Service Manager
  • Manually adding users that were not imported from Active Directory
  • Creating several templates, configuring initial parameters, creating queues, lists, and groups, and then creating a management pack to save any custom objects
  • Installing Service Manager in a production environment in a scenario where Service Manager is installed on four computers