At Cireson, we’re always innovating and creating new solutions to give back to the Community. As experts in Microsoft System Center Service Manager, we thought we’d share a quick how-to on to help Service Manager Admins create a Service Manager List to avoid issues by using best practices and simplifying management of SCSM Management Packs.
Let’s learn how to create an enumerator list and list values within the incident module using best practices for extending the incident class using the SCSM Authoring tool.
Launch the Service Manager Authoring tool and create a new Management Pack. This is where we’ll store our configurations. Name and save the newly created Management Pack. Note – Use naming standards different than the OOB MP names. I like to use company name as the first word, so I can easily filter on my MP’s and then a descriptive title containing the class your extending.
In the Class Browser, navigate to Incident class, highlight Incident.
Right click Incident and select View to open the incident class.
This will open the incident class within the Management Pack Explorer. Within the Management Pack Explorer, expand classes to show Incident Class, then right click to Extend Class. (No worries on using the sealed MP for now since we will save changes to our Management Pack)
Once the class is extended, a warning appears regarding saving changes to the sealed Management Pack. At this point select your Management Pack you created early and save changes.
Within the Management Pack Explorer expand your newly created Management Pack, expand Classes and highlight the “Extension of Incident”, here you will want to provide a descriptive name for the “Class Name”. Note – This name must be unique.
Now click – Create Property to create a new property. By default, the Authoring tool will populate the internal name with Property_40. Change the internal name with a unique name without spaces.
Within the “Class properties and relationships” scroll down to the newly created property and highlight.
Within the details pain of the property navigate to the Data Type and change the property from String to List.
When the “select a list” appears select “create list”.
When the “create list” dialog appears provide a unique internal name with no spaces, provide a display name and description. Click Create.
You are now back at “Select a List” with the newly created List highlighted. Click OK.
Returning to Management Pack Explorer lets right click our custom Management Pack and select Save to save our changes.
Before importing your Management Pack into Service Manager, you must seal the newly created Management Pack so other classes can reference this as well as the ability to sync to the data warehouse. To seal an Management Pack, you can use the Authoring tool or FastSeal. This blog will bypass the sealing process since there’s tons of information on the internet to accomplish this task.
Note – There are two files created as part of this process, the first is the .XML file which is unsealed that you can leverage down the road for future changes to the Management Pack. The second is the .MP file which is the sealed MP, this is the one you want to use to import into Service Manager.
Within the SCSM Console navigate to the Administration workspace and select Management Pack, import management pack. From the “select management packs to import” select your newly created Management Pack to import (the .MP and NOT THE .XML file)
Once the Management Pack has successfully imported, as a best practice restart the SCSM Console to prevent issues.
To verify your newly created Management Pack is working as designed, navigate to the Workitem workspace within the Service Manager Console, expand Incidents and open any IR. Click on the extensions tab at the very top to see the fields, if you select the drop down to select a list item value, it will be blank since we haven’t added to the list at this point. Your Management Pack is successfully working.
To add List Values to your newly created List. It is recommended to create a new Management Pack and save your list values there. To accomplish this, navigate to Library/List select the newly created list and begin adding list values to the list. For best practices it is recommended to create an unsealed Management Pack via Authoring Tool or PowerShell. Create your Management Pack with a Friendly name, Display name and version. Import your Management Pack into the system and add your list values and store in your List Value Management Pack. Note – It is recommended to also create unsealed Management Pack’s to store Built-in List Values for each class. In effect you would have Built-in List Values Management Packs for Incidents, Service Request, Change Management, etc…
To take this to the next step you can add this now to the SCSM Incident form or Analyst Portal Incident form. However, this blog is not going to cover that today. If you’d like to add to the Cireson Analyst Portal refer to the Cireson Support Portal. If you like to the SCSM IR form, there are plenty of sites on the internet that provide that detailed info.
