A long-awaited blog on System Center Service Manager!
We know that System Center Service Manager is built around Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards and Microsoft Operational Framework (MOF). We also know that Service Manager contains the primary ITIL components for Incident, Problem, Service Request, Change & Release Management.
But what is new?
On Aug 5th 2020, we released Update Rollup 2 for Service Manager and there is more. We released a new version of Exchange Connector (4.0) which adds support to OAuth 2.0 based authentication to connect with Exchange Online. And lastly, we also released a new Management Pack for System Center Service Manager. Phew!
The updates that we have brought about in UR2 are in line with trending technologies and our effort in keeping Service Manager as one of the top ITSM products. Let me walk you through some of the important updates.
Supportability for MSOLEDBSQL
As part of the announcement made here which refers to “The previous Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server (SQLOLEDB) and SQL Server Native Client OLE DB provider (SQLNCLI) remains deprecated and it is not recommended to use either for new development work.”, Service Manager team has added support for MSOLEDBSQL driver and we highly recommend users to adopt it. However, Service Manager is still operational with SQL Native Client.
Supportability with SCCM 1806 to 2006
Between SCCM 1806 to 2006, there are changes introduced in few column DataTypes in SCCM Database. This schema change was causing incompatibilities in SCCM Connector of Service Manager. We have now accommodated the schema change and enabled support for SCCM 1806 to 2006 version. Make sure to follow all the installation steps of Update Rollup 2.
OAuth support in Exchange Connector
Basic authentication access for EWS will be disabled in second half of 2021 as per the announcement, the authentication protocol for accessing the EWS needs to accommodate OAuth 2.0 in order to avoid disruption. Exchange Connector 4.0 contains all the previous fixes and adds support to OAuth based authentication for EWS to connect to Exchange Online. This release supports System Center Service Manager 2016 and later versions.
Note: This change applies only to Office 365 mailboxes and not to on-premises Exchange Server mailboxes, which shall continue to honor basic authentication access for EWS
All the above updates and bug fixes are signs of continuous Improvement lifecycle that we want to bring about in Service Manager Product Roadmap. Having said that, there were numerous set of improvements in the previous Update Rollup too, check here. As always, one of the key ingredients to deliver high impactful product features is user feedback. Feel free to share your views and any updates that you are looking forward to in the comments section below. Any form of feedback is critical which helps us shape better products for future.
