What's New in System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager

 

Published: November 10, 2015

Updated: January 4, 2017

Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager

System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager was updated for System Center 2012 R2 to add support the following operating systems:

• Windows Server 2012 R2

• Windows 8.1

For details about known issues that could affect you before you install Service Manager, read the Release Notes for Service Manager in System Center 2012 R2. Planning and deployment information is at Planning for System Center 2012 - Service Manager and Deploying System Center 2012 - Service Manager.

You can read about the fixes included in System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager at Thomas Ellermann’s blog.

Support for SQL Server 2014 SP2

SQL Server 2014 SP2 is supported to host your Service Manager database and your data warehouse database when you have Update Rollup 9. You can download Update Rollup 9 at https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=50744.

New Self Service portal

System Center 2012 R2 Update Roll-Up 8 contains a new HTML-based Self Service Portal which offers the following enhancements:

• Updated modern UI with easy-to-use navigation

• Multiple browser support

• Announcements are now supported in the portal

• New Service Catalog

• Rich search for help articles

• My Activities and My Request management

• Server caching to reduce database calls and improve portal performance

• Available in 23 languages

• Rich customization

For more information and installing and customizing the portal, see Deploy the New Self-Service Portal.

Note

The older Silverlight and SharePoint-based Self-Service portal is not compatible with the newer version. You can use either the new or old portal. If you have the older Self-Service portal installed, you must remove it before install the new portal.

Announcements in the Self Service Portal

You can see Announcements in the portal in the upper right corner.

When you click Announcements, the list is displayed.

• Active announcements appear collapsed on the portal home page.

Service Catalog in the Self Service Portal

You can see the Service Catalog in the portal in the upper left corner.

• The Service Catalog on the home page presents all the request offerings, grouped by their respective service offerings (sorted in alphabetical order), accessible to the logged in user.

• Favorites appear on top of all other request offerings, for easy access to selected request offerings.

• Clicking a request offering tile opens a new page containing the description, associated knowledge articles, and the form with options to submit or go back.

• When you click the favorite icon for an offering, which appears as a heart-shaped image, it is added to the favorites list.

Help Articles in the Self Service Portal

The Help Articles icon is on the left side of the portal home page.

• When a user clicks the Help Articles tab on the navigation bar, the list of all help articles that are marked as a favorite and the most popular help articles are displayed.

• Clicking share generates an email draft with following information.

  • Email Subject: Title of help article

  • Email Body: Title and the hyperlink of help article

• The portal displays and allows searches only to the help articles that are accessible to the logged in user.

• The hyperlink to the help article only works for those users who have access to that article.

• Clicking Favorite this adds the help article to the list of favourite help articles for easy access to frequently used help pages.

My Requests in the Self Service Portal

The My Requests icon is on the left side of the portal home page.

• My Requests displays all the incidents and service requests where the signed-in user is the affected user.

My Activities in the Self Service Portal

The My Activities icon is on the left side of the portal home page.

• My Activities shows all the manual and review activities which have the signed-in user as the activity implementer or if the user is in the reviewer list.