Orchestrator and Service Manager–Better Together (but not required together)

First published on TECHNET on Apr 25, 2012
While at MMS last week, it was apparent that many people were still finding out about Orchestrator. One of the most common comments I heard was something like “I really think Orchestrator is cool, but I already have a Service Manager-like tool in place. Do I have to install Service Manager to use Orchestrator?” I thought I would take a quick moment to clear up a misconception…

While we would certainly prefer that you use Service Manager with Orchestrator, and we’ve got some integrations that make the combination of Service Manager and Orchestrator pretty awesome. it’s not required that you have Service Manager in order to use Orchestrator. In fact, even though we have Integration Packs for all the System Center products and have worked to provide solutions to some really cool scenarios across the System Center product line, you could use Orchestrator all by itself. Don’t forget that we provide Integration Packs for third-party products like NetCool and VMWare too! We also provide the Orchestrator Integration Toolkit so that anyone can build their own Integration Packs or custom activities. One of Orchestrator’s biggest benefits is its extensibility and flexibility in how you can use it.

So, when you think about how cool Orchestrator is and want to start looking at how it can work for you, just remember that it works great by itself, works even better with the other System Center products, and works really well with lots of other things too!