Service Manager 2012 Beta has been released!!

Again, another System Center product sneaks out without a major announcement from the teams blog :S


At last, the Beta for Service Manager 2012 has been released.

This latest version brings the following additions to the product:

• Service Requests
• Release Management
• Service Catalog
• Service Level Agreement support for Incident and Service Requests
• Parent – child support for incident and release management
• A Dynamic, Super Duper, Share Point based Self Service Portal
• Parallel Activities
• Build & Environments
• Connector Enhancements
• Orchestrator Runbook Integration
• Virtual Machine Manager Integration
• Console Performance Improvements
• Reporting and Data Warehouse improvements (OLAP Cubes, Excel Pivot Tables, Sharepoint Dashboards)
• Service Manager 2010 can be upgraded to SCSM 2012 Beta

Installation hasn't changed that much from 2010, other than it explains the pre-requisites a bit better and Share Point Foundation or above is now required for the Self Service Portal.

You can find the download link here:
www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27844


The hardware requirements for the servers hasn't changed, but some of the software requirements have.

Consoles:

• Windows XP and Server 2003 is no longer supported for the console, time to migrate if you haven't already!
• Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable
• Windows PowerShell 1.0 or Windows PowerShell 2.0
• ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• Microsoft Analysis Management Objects (AMOs)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with SP1

Management Servers:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• SQL Native Client
• SQL Server 2008 Analysis Management Objects
• SQL Server 2008 Analysis Data Objects
• PowerShell 2.0

For the Self Service Portal:

• SharePoint 2010 (Foundation or above)
• .Net 4.0
• Silverlight 4.0 (Client side)
• IE 8 or 9 (Client side)
• Firefox is not (presently) a supported browser for the Self Service Portal.

Reporting/Datawarehouse:

• SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Installing/upgrading the Beta edition will provide a time limited 180 day version, even for fully licenced 2010 installs.  However, the ability to upgrade to RTM, and the non-time limited select version is expected to be possible.  The upgrade from Beta to RTM is NOT supported by Microsoft, other than for TAP customers so do NOT be upgrading your production systems with the 2012 beta, this is purely available for you to test in a lab environment.

One big change, is the fact that if you intend to monitor your service manager servers with Operations Manager 2012 then it's worth noting that it is only supported with agentless monitoring due to compatibility issues.  Check this link for more details on how to setup agentless monitoring: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh264859.aspx