Sometimes when you look at the Change Request Calendar, do you ever wonder who will be on-call during your change week or day? Has there been a time that a change goes horribly wrong, and you find yourself struggling to figure out who to contact to help with your roll back? A lot of times I find myself helping a

Simple Installation of SMP Helper Tool Gathering information and troubleshooting in the Cireson Portal often involves looking at files in various places, running SQL scripts and sending logs to Support. James Atance, our senior support analyst in EMEA saw the need for a tool to simplify this process and created what we now call the SMP Helper Tool. It has

The power of Microsoft Configuration Manager (SCCM) makes it possible for Administrators to deploy software, protect data, monitor health, and enforce compliance across all devices in an organization. But with great power comes challenges and frustrations for management, maintenance, and delegation. Collaborating with industry leaders and Microsoft MVPs, including Kent Agerlund, Niall Brady, Wally Mead, and Anoop Nair, we compiled

Supporting Global Customers Part 1: Leveraging Logs Many of the issues we troubleshoot with our global customers involve errors that vary in how and when they show up within an application. When something is not working the way it should, log files are a great place to look for clues.  Here are a few pointers we share with global customers:

*Submissions Now Open* Sharing is caring – It’s your chance to show off a #humblebrag and inspire others within the community on how you’ve gone above and beyond with the Cireson Self-Service Portal and/or Analyst Portal. Our customers and community members fight the good support fight daily providing top notch customer service. They’ve done some really cool things with the

Let me start by saying I Love Configuration Manager! For those of you that don’t know, System Center Configuration Manager is now 25 years old. Brad Anderson recently blogged about it and even celebrated this milestone at Microsoft Ignite. Personally, my love affair with ConfigMgr started when it was still SMS (No not a text message service, but Server Management System). Over the years,

SCCM Security As a Service Desk Manager, you understand what it means to be the public face of IT to your company. Odds are, you started out in level one or level two support and worked your way up. For the longest time, the Service Desk function was mostly to triage issue and requests. If the suggestions the Analyst offered

If you wanted to see info around what Cireson Apps your Product Key is licensed for and info around when they expire then you can run the following PowerShell query on the SCSM Management Server that is hosting the Cireson Portal. Please remember to add in your Product Key in the first line of the query. $ProductKey = “************************” $SMDIR 

Event Log in the Cireson Portal From time to time you may come across an issue in the Cireson Portal for Service Manager and need to contact support to work through a problem to find a solution. One of the key pieces of information used by support is some log files generated by the system. Reading the CacheBuilder and WebConsole Log

Sometimes when working on Incidents you might need an additional property that isn’t available out of the box.  Maybe you want to tag incidents as “VIP.” Maybe you want to add a custom field.  Fortunately, Microsoft has provided the Authoring tool capable of extending the Incident Class, and with the Cireson Portal for Service Manager, it’s super easy to bring

Many of Cireson’s new applications are being released on the Cireson Platform rather than relying on the existing technology of IIS to host the site the applications run on. This has many advantages that I won’t go in to within this blog post. Instead, I’m going to cover one of the most frequent questions I get asked and that is

“With great power, comes great responsibility.” I heard that in a movie once. This is a quote that Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager Admins know all too well. Configuration Manager has a lot of power to manage a company’s servers and workstations from a central point. Gone are the days of carrying around discs to put an OS or application