Expiscornovus

Since a while I’ve been working with a new Microsoft product from the System Center family called Service Manager 2010. I’ve been putting a lot of time and effort in using it and I wanted to share this with you. So from now on I’m gonna write some blogposts about it. I’m gonna try to do this in a persona-scenario kind of way. But one step back, what the heck is Service Manager 2010 anyway? I can write a whole definition about it but Microsoft also has a clear one:

System Center Service Manager 2010
Microsoft System Center Service Manager is an integrated platform for automating and adapting your organization’s IT service management best practices, such as those found in Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It provides built-in processes for incident and problem resolution, change control, and asset lifecycle management. Through its configuration management database (CMDB) and process integration, Service Manager automatically connects knowledge and information from System Center Operations Manager, System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory.
Source: Microsoft

First of all what I want to do is show you part of SCSM 2010 and what it does out of the box. My first focus will be on working with incidents in SCSM 2010. In SCSM 2010 they have delivered an incident management pack based on best practices like MOF and ITIL. A high level overview about incident management is written by Ketan Ghelani overhere.

I’m using the following personas and scenario for this. I have used the Microsoft Dynamics Customer model for this.

Personas
Lisa – Customer Service Representative
Charlie – Customer

Scenario #001 – Lisa creates an incident
Lisa gets a call from Charlie at the Helpdesk number. Charlie tells Lisa that he isn’t able to use his e-mail. This is already the second time this happened. Last time a colleague from Lisa helped him with that incident. Charlie also tells Lisa that he is away for the next few days and that he is only available via landline number +1 123 456 789

Like you see above, this is not the most interesting scenario. But it does give you a first idea of what kind of interface we are dealing with. So this is the main reason why I’m posting this, showing you the User experience of SCSM 2010.

Lisa executes the following steps in this scenario:
1. Log on to the SCSM 2010 console
2. Create an incident & fill in the details
3. Relate an older incident
4. Activate the incident & watch it in the incident overview

1. Log on to the SCSM 2010 console
This is of course the most basic step. I added this one to still give you an idea what you will experience when first opening the console.

2. Create an incident & fill in the details
Most important part of this step is to view the interface. There are a few important parts in the interface of creating a work item, in this case an incident. You have a status part on top of your screen, tabs with information about your work item and a tasks pane on the right to do something with the work item.

3. Relate an older incident
One of the features in this management pack and the product itself is that you can relate a lot of stuff to a work item. In this scenario I’m showing you how to relate another incident to this current incident.

4. Activate the incident & watch it in the incident overview
Like I stated in one the previous screenshots SCSM 2010 is working with folders and views to show work items. I wanted to show the end result to also give you an overview of this interface.

So this is a quick overview of how to register a incident and in general a work item in System Center Service Manager 2010. If you have some questions or feedback feel free to comment in the section below. I will post some new scenarios soon.

Sources:
Microsoft Service Manager product page
High level overview incident management written by Ketan Ghelani on the Microsoft Service Manager 2010 team blog
Microsoft Dynamics Customer model poster
Microsoft Opeations Framework

Lately I’m building different kind of features, which can be very easy and interesting, but more on that later on. When I tried to bind some of those features to different kind of lists I came across the subject of ListTemplate ID’s.

ListTemplate ID’s
Every ListTemplate is associated with a different kind of ID, a value which can be used within a feature. For instance, a announcements list template is associated with the value 104. This can be very useful if you want to bind your feature to just document libraries.

	
		
			DeletingEventHandler
			ItemDeleting
			10000
			DeletingEventHandler, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=f5cce5f062aa189d
			DeletingEventHandler.DeletingAction
			
			
		
	

The example above shows how to use a event receiver in your elements.xml file of a feature. In this case my event handler feature registers receiver for the ItemDeleting event of a Announcements list template. It uses my custom code described in the DeletingAction class (.cs).

Reference ListTemplate ID’s.
It can be useful to know the different kind of ListTemplate ID’s when you create features. When googling I came across some reference posts on ListTemplate ID’s. I decided to put them together into one table and added two Listtemplate ID’s I discovered myself. I found 1300 Translation Management library & 1301 Languages & Translations. For all the others ID’s the credits go to MSDN library, Mike Smith & Alex from Phase 2.

If there are any errors in the table above or you have new ID’s please let me know.

About 3 years ago this was one of the first questions I got when I started my first internship. Back then I was working with Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 & WSS v2. Soon I discovered it wasn’t as easy as it looked, but I got the basic idea. Every modification was by hand, but has something changed since then?

Classic 2003 way to create a custom theme
Create a custom theme the ‘2003 way’ was mainly copying, pasting & editing files on the sharepoint web server. Especially the editing of the theme stylesheet, which contains a enormous amount of elements & classes, was a hell of a job. Fortunately tools like Color cop & Internet Explorer developer toolbar made it a bit manageable. Also resources like Heather Solomon’s CSS reference guide were pretty useful.

The basic steps were:
1. Copy a existing theme on the MOSS web server
2. Renaming setup file (.inf)
3. Modifying the stylesheets, images
4. Adding the theme to the TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML file

If you are searching for howto’s I can recommend articles from: Sharepoint End User Content Team, Tigirry’s Sharepoint Blog & Dan Lewis

Creating a custom theme MOSS style
Since then a lot has changed in the world of Sharepoint. Cool things like solutions, timer jobs & features were introduced with the release of MOSS. But googling on “create custom theme moss” still gives the same result. Copying & editing theme files on the web server.

Has nothing really changed since then? No, some things have changed, thanks to the wonderfull MOSS community.

That is also the main reason of this post. Two days ago I came across a this post from Keith Dahlby from Solutionizing.net about his STSDev Theme solution generator. He wrote that he added this option to the codeplex project STSDEV. It automates all step 1,2 & 4 described in the 2003 way and adds it to a Visual Studio project. And instead of manually copying it to the web server it creates a solution!

Adding import technique to Theme solution project in VST
One of the drawbacks of this was that if you upgrade the theme solution you still had to re-apply it by hand to the sites that are already using it. In some scenario’s this can be a problem. At this point the @import technique described by Heather Solomon comes around the corner. Keith Dahlby was already talking about implementing this in his generator, so looking forward to it.

In the meantime I manually added the import technique to my Visual Studio project, this is how I did it.

1. Follow Keiths steps described in this post to develop a theme solution project with STSDEV found on Codeplex

2. Create a new folders in the ROOTFILES directory for your theme.css file, I use the LAYOUTS/1033/STYLES/ location, as described in Heather’s @import technique post.

3. Copy your theme.css file from the THEMES folder in ROOTFILES into the newly created folder in step 2

4. Edit the theme.css file in the THEMES folder by removing al styles and replacing it by the single line:
[sourcecode language=css]@import “/_layouts/1033/styles/ExpiscornovusTheme/theme.css”;[/sourcecode]

5. That’s it, if you build the project you get a solution file (.wsp). Next time you upgrade your theme solution you don’t have to re-apply the theme to every individual site that uses it, just press (ctrl + ) F5!

Customizing
Although this solution makes the creation and deployment of custom themes a lot easier it is still a good idea to think about customizing. Customizing a theme is still basicly editing a extensive CSS file. If you want it to look completely different from the basic MOSS look be aware this could be a hell of a job with all those elements. If you want to read more about theme customization I can recommend one resource in general: Heather Solomon’s blog. She has a lot of great articles on customizing, so definitely visit that blog.

Update 07-10-2008
Removed step 5 because the ddf & manifest files are modified during the rebuild process.

I have love/hate affairs with a lot of things. One of them is Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. Another one is blogging. A while ago I did both. Time to give it another try.