Service Manager Management Packs

Service Manager 2010 utilizes System Center Common Technology Platform and enhances the management pack schema

What are management packs? They are collections of logic used to tell System Center components such as Service Manager and Operations Manager what to do. They are the brain used by these products and serve two primary purposes:

• Providing storage of customizations
• Enabling a packaging mechanisms for partners and the community to deliver additional solutions on top of what Microsoft delivers

Service Manager management packs can include extensions to the data model, form customizations, workflow rules, notification subscriptions, list items, views, templates, notification templates, groups, queues, console tasks, data warehouse extensions, reports, workflows, and custom forms.

Management packs are written in XML. They can be sealed (not modifiable) or unsealed (modifiable). Sealing a management pack protects its integrity as it prevents modifications to the management pack itself; customizations are stored in another management pack - typically unsealed so it can be easily modified - that references the sealed management pack. Sealing a management pack turns it from a file with a .xml extension to a .mp file, with is a binary representation of the management pack rather than a human-readable XML file. As a binary file, it can be digitally signed, which ensures the file was signed by its creator and has not been modified. Service Manager management packs can be sealed either with the fastseal command-line utility or the Service Manager Authoring Tool.

As discussed previously (http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/common-system-center-architecture), Service Manager 2010 is built upon the common technology platform shared with other Microsoft products such as Operations Manager, System Center Essentials, Virtual Machine Manager, and InTune. These other products are currently using the 1.0 version of the management pack schema. Service Manager 2010 uses the 1.1 version of the schema. Other products using the common technology platform will pick up this new version of the schema in future versions. Changes to the schema are additive.

What's new in Version 1.1?

• The concept of a class extension (when you extend a nonabstract class, you can add new properties to that class; all other classes deriving from that class inherit those properties)
• New data types for properties (Enumeration, RichText, and Binary)
• New elements to declare data warehouse extensions such as Fact, Outrigger, Measure, Dimension, WarehouseModule, DataWarehouse Script, and DataWarehouseDataSet
• New sections such as Resources, Categories, and Templates

As the System Center 2012 products begin to release, it will be interesting to see additions to the common technology platform and management pack enhancements.

• Microsoft
• System Management
• management pack 1.1 extensions
• management pack schema
• management packs
• sealed management packs
• Service Manager 2010
• System Center
• unsealed management packs