There’s a lot you can do with Service Manager to make it work better out of the box for your organization. With over 52,000 System Center consulting hours at Cireson, we’ve compiled a list of best practice tips to help maximize your investment and increase productivity. Check some of them out below:

• Service Manager requires heavy duty disk I/O. Make sure you have the highest speed disks available for your environment.
• Verify all permissions are given to Service Accounts, and that all Microsoft documented pre-requisites for Service Manager are followed.
• Come up with a naming convention and strategy for your various management packs, and stick with it!
• Choose the right build for your organization. Service Manager has a “fast” and a “slow” channel available for new releases, with varying lengths of support.
• Split your environment into a Development, QA/Testing, and Production environment. Build everything in the Development system and elevate to QA/Testing then Production.
• Consider disaster recovery and uptime requirements, and create as many Service Manager Management Servers as are appropriate for your needs.

We have numerous free SCSM apps for the community to help you #domore with your System Center investment. Download as many as you wish!

• Analyst Portal Community: A web-based Portal for SCSM featuring Incident Management for Analysts
• Self-Service Portal: A complete replacement of the Microsoft Self-Service Portal for Service Manager.
• Auto Close: Configure how many days an Incident, Service Request, Change, etc. should be closed within.
• Advanced Send Email: Allows an Analyst to send an email to the affected user or other recipients from the context of an Incident within the SCSM Console.
• Notify Analyst: Configure all work items to automatically send email notifications to an Analyst, or their associated support groups, in addition to notifying the assigned to Analyst and/or Affected User when a comment is added.
• Service Desk Ticker: Create an announcement within SCSM and communicate the announcement to an employee’s computer in real time.
• Time Tracker: Record time spent working on other types of Work Items.

Check out some of the highlights from the Cireson Community and and join the discussion today!

• SMP Helper: The SMP helper tool is a collection of very useful Cireson & SCSM PowerShell and SQL queries all brought together within a user-friendly GUI application.
• SMlets based Exchange Connector: Powerful Exchange Connector built with PowerShell SMlets.
• Export Workitem to HTML: This PowerShell app lets you export a whole Work Item including Action Log and History to a HTML file.
• SCSM Entity Explorer: GUI to examine behind-the-scenes data in Service Manager.
• Papercut: Local SMTP server for testing notifications without the risk of spamming your constituents.
• HTML Template Tester: Quick and straightforward way to test notification content, without fussing with their triggers.

Here are some helpful third-party SCSM apps.

• Cireson Portal Monitoring SCOM Management Pack: This Management Pack provides discovery, monitoring and alerting for all the key supporting components of Cireson Portal instances.
• SCSM Enumeration Builder: With Enumeration Builder we can create an unsealed MP containing as many list items as you need.
• SCSM Data Warehouse Architecture Diagram: This Visio diagram shows the various connectors, ETL jobs, and databases involved in the Service Manager data warehouse.
• SCSM Sizer Tool: This tool can be used to size your Service Manager deployment based on how much data you plan to manage.
• System Center 2016 and 2012 Visio Stencils: SCSM Visio stencils.
• SCSM Cookbook 2012 edition: View configuration and admnistration tips.
• Service Manager Documentation: View SCSM documentation from Microsoft.
• SCSM Survival Guide: Useful tips for SCSM Admins from Microsoft.

Journey Through ITSM with SCSM & Cireson
Walk through the journey of Incident Management, Service Fulfillment and Change Management to align your ITSM program with ITIL best practices.  These webinar recordings share tips for developing a mature ITSM program and focus on elements to ensure your ITSM goals are achieved.

• Part 1: Best Practices for Building an Incident Request Program: Explore best practices for implementing Incident Management for improved Service Delivery, Incident Reporting, and increased end user satisfaction. Using SCSM and Cireson, we cover how to get started and do a deep dive of the free Analyst Portal Community app as well as the Self-Service Portal Community app.
• Part 2: Efficient Handling of Service Requests: Building on Incident Management best practices for SCSM, learn how to architect your Service Fulfillment program to support process workflows and automation. Explore the tools available and best practices to ensure success on the Service Fulfillment part of your ITIL journey.
• Part 3: Proactive Change Management: Every IT department faces the challenge of replacing older technologies with newer ones, updating software applications, performing security patches and updates, and other changes to meet business objectives. The key to successfully making changes across the business is to be prepared. But what does that involve? Learn tips for proactive Change Management, including considerations and configurations.