Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook Book Review

A while ago I had the option to play with Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager and found out that it was not something that you setup and use is just a minute. And yes my knowledge of the product was to short.  I did find blogpost books etc. But I saw this book on packtpub

Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook.

The authors of this book are key players in the System Center/Service Manager space. And fellow MVPs :

Anders Asp

• He is very active on the official Service Manager forums at TechNet and regularly blogs about the product on his own blog at www.scsm.se . In April 2012, he was awarded with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title in the "System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management" area.

Andreas Baumgarten

• Andreas is an IT architect around the System Center product family and blogger. He has been in IT 1998. http://startblog.hud.de  In October 2012, he was awarded with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for "System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management".

Samuel Erskine

• Sam has over 15 years experience in IT across various industry sectors (public and private). Sam is a consultancy practice business owner and independent IT consultant. Samuel specializes in services that support and enhance customer experiences of business applications. He is an active participant in the System Center community with a blog at www.frameworktorealwork.com

 

Steven Beaumont

• Steve is an ICT professional clocking up over 15 years of experience ranging from low end system building to managing a crack team of enterprise class support specialists to now providing consultancy and designs for system center products.
• He also runs his own blog (http://systemscentre.blogspot.com) covering the full range of System Center components and areas related to desktop design, deployment,
  and optimization.

Dieter Gasser

• Dieter Gasser is an IT Consultant and co-founder of the company Syliance IT Services, headquartered in Switzerland, and specializes in Service Manager delivery and customization.In 2010 he entered the systems management and automation market. With his technical and managerial background, he has been focusing on Service Manager ever since. Together with his colleagues, he delivers datacenter management and automation solutions based on Microsoft System Center to customers all over Switzerland. His blog: http://blog.dietergasser.com

You can find out more information on the book here:

http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-system-center-service-manager-2012-cookbook/book

 

With almost 500 pages of SCSM 2012 is a big book. with his 11 chapters it is divided in technical and more reading stuff like the ITIL and ITSM , MOF frameworks. but it is just basics. If you want more configuration and how to it then this book is also recommended, there are a lot of how to’s and samples in the book easy to read and to do.

Creating items in SCSM 2012 configuring it it is all there

But also templates design / adjustments / building and configuring reports.

And if you know all this stuff and you want more in depth stuff there is chapter 10/11 using System Center 2012 Service Manager Authoring Tool and advanced management pack authoring techniques for extending, customizing and personalizing your installation of Service Manager.
In particular, we will be covering the following tasks:

• Using the SCSM Authoring Tool
• Extending Service Manager classes
• Sealing Management Packs
• Creating new classes
• Customizing default forms
• Creating your own forms
• Using an XML editor to modify Management Packs
• Building runbooks

 

I did like also the appendix a community overview of all the best blogs and links.

The book is great for starters and for advanced ITPRO’s the product is not jet widely accepted in company’s but you will see this more and more. know the basics and start playing with it. with this book you will manage to deploy and have it ready for usage.

And yes if you don’t know the basics the setup will fail and it will all be blamed on the product as always.

You can buy the book in ebook but also a printed copy. I personaly like the printed, open the book and play with it make notes in the book etc. but the ebook is handy for fast search.

You can find out more information on the book here:

http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-system-center-service-manager-2012-cookbook/book

Happy reading.

All credits to the writers.