[Update]
The Update Rollup 7 for Service Manager 2012 R2 is now available for download at
https://aka.ms/sm2012r2ur7
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Hi everyone! With nearing the end of July, it's now time to upgrade your Service Manager 2012 R2 with another rollup of important enhancements and bug fixes. The next iteration of Update Rollup (UR7) will become available for download on Microsoft Download Center on 28th of July. This update contains a wide array of features & improvements including write collision avoidance, fixes for major MPSync issues, support for having employee-manager relationship even when both are fetched from different AD connectors, support for delta AD sync during DC failover, and many more.
Lets start the in-depth overview with the star of this update rollup which will save our users from annoyance of frequently running into following exception -
This error dialog box is no less than a nightmare for SM helpdesk analysts because it makes them lose all the changes which they have made if some other analyst or workflow has updated the item in parallel. We have got a lot of customer complaints regarding the everyday usability issues caused by this, and in fact fixing this limitation is currently the highest voted request on our connect portal. We have heard you, and with this update release Service manager will allow analysts to save their changes if other workflow or analyst has updated the same item simultaneously with disjoint changes. In case of conflicting changes, the error will provide details of conflicting fields to provide a choice to the analyst for incorporating disjoint updates and save the rest of changes without refreshing the form. You can read in-depth details about this new feature from this recently published blog post .
Furthermore with UR7, we are making some significant enhancements with AD connector, which is one of the most widely used SM components among the customers-
- AD connector is expected to sync only that data, which has got changed since the last run, but with the current behavior, the AD connector performs a complete sync again after any DC failover and hence puts an unnecessary load on the workflow server causing the performance to degrade. This problem has got addressed in this rollup and going forward, the AD connector will have a delta sync in case of DC failover also.
- With UR7 installed, the service manager will automatically establish employee-manager relationship even if both the users are imported from different AD connectors.
- If a User changes from having a manager in AD to NOT having a manager, the relationship is not updated in the CMDB. With UR7, SM will sync these changes too.
In addition to these, the other area where SM customers frequently end up in trouble is with Datawarehouse when MPSync job gets hung. After updating an MP or while re-registering the DW, the admins sometimes notice that data in reports is no longer fresh. They check Console Datawarehouse\Jobs and see that everything is running but somehow updated data is not getting in DW. These kind of issues are very common with DW users and typically happen when the MPSync job gets hung. The most common reason for getting into the hung state is when the deployment of MPs fails because of the system trying to re-create an already existing primary/foreign key in a table. UR7 is addressing this major problem and will help in stabilizing your DW deployments significantly along with other DW fixes shipped in previous update rollups.
Things don’t end here, this rollup also mends following bugs in Service Manager which will further reduce your pains with the product -
• Actual Start date and Actual end date do not get populated for most of the activities. After this update installed, these fields should get populated for all type of activities in Service Manager.
• SM Console crashes when trying to open an E-Mail with ":" in its name that was attached to an Incident via Exchange Connector (like in case of prefixes “RE:” and “FW:” added by outlook).
• The SLA information which appear in SM Console does not reflect updated status in Data Warehouse if there are multiple status changes between two successive runs of transform job.
• The request offering wizard throws a cryptic "XML parsing error" and prevents the user from continuing with the request offering creation. This causes a problem if management packs are modified in Visual Studio (or any program that "pretty-prints" XML).
• ‘Get-SCDWInfraLocations’ cmdlet (shipped in UR5) is enhanced to support automation and all PowerShell standards –
- Now it is renamed to “Get-SCDWInfraLocation” – It was done to make it follow powershell naming convention standards.
- Originally it expected “DWServer” parameter but now it was removed. Now it accepts the same parameters as other DW Cmdlets and parameter “ComputerName” can be used to pass DW Server name. and the parameter “Credential” is used for passing Credentials to log on to the DW Server. These parameters are same across most of the DW Cmdlets.
- Now it returns an object to Powershell pipeline instead of just text output. It enables this Cmdlet to be automation friendly which means this Cmdlet can be used in scripting.
- Default format of the output is Table format and can be customized.
- Detailed Help documentation is added to the Cmdlet.
All these significant updates will soon be available for download, but meanwhile feel free to use the comment section to share your feedback and suggestions. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts about these enhancements.