System Center Service Manager – Exchange Connector 2.0 Released #sysctr

The System Center Service Manager – Exchange Connector connects Service Manager to Exchange for processing incoming emails related to incidents and change requests. The emails can update the incident action log or change the status of an incident to resolved or closed. Incoming emails with special keywords allow a change request reviewer to approve or reject a review activity and activity implementers can mark activities assigned to them as completed. The Send Email solution allows analysts to send messages to users via email from the console.

Feature Bullet Summary: The Exchange Connector 2.0 release is compatible with Service Manager 2010 SP1. It contains the bug fixes and still contains the original set of features including:

•Create incident from email

•Update incident action log from email

•Resolve or close incidents from email

•Approve/reject change requests from email

•Update change request “action log” from email

•Mark manual activities completed from email

•Add email file attachment to work items as attachments

•Send notifications to users from the console

Send Email Solution

The Send Email solution is a separate solution that is packaged with the Exchange Connector for convenience, but it can be deployed with or without the Exchange connector technically. When you have both of them deployed and configured you can enable the end-to-end lifecycle for emails around incident management. For example, an analyst can be looking at a ticket and click a ‘Send Email’ task to request additional information from the affected user. When the user replies to that email with the additional information, the incident is automatically updated.

Recap

Bottom line this release has some bug-fixes but doesn’t introduce any new features. Take into account this version of the Exchange Connector 2.0 is not officially supported by Microsoft!

As the product team is working hard to address all the needs we have regarding the current version of Exchange Connector I’m looking forward to the new version of the Exchange Connector in Service Manager 2012. I can promise you on behalf of the product team – that would be really fun! Did I make you curious? Follow us…

The Service Manager – Exchange Connector 2.0 can be downloaded here