Introduction
Welcome to Microsoft System Center: Optimizing Service Manager. We (the authors) all work with systems management at Microsoft and believe that the Microsoft System Center suite is one of the most integrated suites on the market for this purpose.
Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager is the only product that can integrate across most of the System Center suite and Active Directory. Service Manager is a fast and reliable product that can create and maintain a dynamic service management database to enable interaction across the organization, both inside and outside the IT department, making it a very compelling product to many organizations.
Over the last several years, more and more customers have implemented Service Manager, either independently or via Microsoft or a partner. Sometimes the project and product implementation are not as successful as they should be. Our objectives with this book are to provide you with a framework for planning and delivering a successful Service Manager project and to share some of our experiences and best practices when it comes to optimizing and maintaining your Service Manager environment.
This book is written with three different roles in mind: business and technical decision makers; IT architects; and Service Manager administrators. You can either read this book in its entirety from A to Z, or you can follow one of the learning paths below depending on your role:
▪ Business and technical decision makers:
• Chapter 1 Business reasons to choose Service Manager
• Chapter 2 Deployment costs and non-IT usage
▪ IT architects
• Chapter 3 How to plan for Service Manager
• Chapter 4 How to prepare for a Service Manager installation
▪ Service Manager administrators
• Chapter 5 Management packs
• Chapter 6 Optimizing the Service Manager environment
• Chapter 7 Service Manager configuration and customization
About the companion content
The companion content for this book can be downloaded from the following page:
http://aka.ms/SCserviceMgr/files
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the following people who helped review the content of this book for technical accuracy:
▪ Rob van der Burg, Business Program Manager, Microsoft Netherlands
▪ Jon Sabberton, Architect, Microsoft Gulf, United Arab Emirates
▪ Murat Erentürk, Senior Architect, Microsoft MEA HQ
Errata & book support
We’ve made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this content and its companion content. Any errors that have been reported since this content was published are listed on our Microsoft Press site:
http://aka.ms/SCserviceMgr/errata
If you find an error that is not already listed, you can report it to us through the same page.
If you need additional support, email Microsoft Press Book Support at [email protected].
Please note that product support for Microsoft software is not offered through the addresses above.
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