First published on TECHNET on Feb 22, 2012
In Service Manager 2010 we had an announcements section of the self-service portal out of the box. Out of the box the Announcements view is still there in the Administration workspace in the main console, but there isn’t a web part out of the box on the portal to display those announcements. The reason for this is simply that we ran out of time in the Service Manager 2012 development cycle to build and test an announcements web part that would display the announcements out of the Service Manager database. There is a workaround which is to add a SharePoint announcements web part to your portal. The upside of this is that it is super easy to do and you can control what columns are displayed, etc. The downside is that you don’t get some of the benefits of using announcements coming from SCSM. You can’t control the visibility of announcements using user roles. You can’t create the announcements using the SCSM SDK/PowerShell. You also have to maintain the announcements separately from SCSM.
At some point I may create a CodePlex project to create a simple announcements web part. Mostly I want to do this to show how to build a web part but it would also be a useful solution as well. If there is enough demand for it, we’ll also consider adding it to a future version of System Center out of the box.
In the meantime though, I’ve wanted to blog how you could use Orchestrator to publish your announcements from SCSM to SharePoint. Anders Bengtsson, one of our Premier Field Engineers beat me to it though.
Check out his blog post on how to do it:
http://contoso.se/blog/?p=2817
Thanks for writing that up Anders! Nice blog post.
