System Center Service Manager is a new product in the System Center family. Microsoft has three main goals with the product:

- Comprehensive and easy to use and customizable Service Desk capabilities
- Central integration point for service management workflows across other System Center solutions
- Built-in support for service management best practice frameworks such as Microsoft Operations
Framework (MOF) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

As mentioned, integration is part of the solution and this is really great! Service Manager has three connectors whichs delivers that integration. A connector for Active Directory, Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007 SP1. In this post we will talk about the last one.

For Service Manager, only version ConfigMgr SP1 is supported. ConfigMgr can collect a lot of information about resources on the network. Information about hard- and software, software deployment, software updates and configuration management information is all collected and stored in the database of ConfigMgr.
Besides the ConfigMgr administrators this information is also very valuable for the Service Desk. With the in Service Manager built-in connector all ConfigMgr assets can be imported and stored in the Configuration Management Database of Service Manager.

Compliancy
A feature in Configuration Manager 2007 is Desired Configuration Management. Based on a configuration item and baseline compliancy of clients can be validated. A simple configuration item can be that the item checks if the Windows firewall is enabled. With the baseline you can specify a schedule and a target collection. When the firewall is disabled for systems in that target collection they will be non-compliant.
These configuration baselines can also be imported in Service Manager so Service Manager can monitor for software-, security and version compliancy. When non-compliancy is detected incidents can automatically be created for these non-compliant systems.

Roadmap
Service Manager is planned for release first quarter of 2010. I’m involved in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) with Microsoft. Currently we have implemented latest code (CTP2) and the connector with ConfigMgr is created. Upcoming months we will definitely test some scenarios with Service Manager and Configuration Manager 2007, so keep in touch!