In System Center 2012 - Service Manager we introduced the concept of a “Global Operators Group”. This group can be used to limit the number of users that are being shown in fields like “Assigned To” and ”Primary Owner” on the incident forms and similar fields on other work item forms. The idea here is to restrict these fields to a subset of users that would normally be assigned to work on a work item. By restricting the number of users in those fields the lookups can be faster. If you do not configure this feature the opposite can happen!
Out of the box, the group “Global Operators Group” contains no users which means that any user is considered a person that a work item could be assigned to. When you try to lookup a user on the “Assigned To” or ”Primary Owner” fields by either typing in the first part of a person’s name or clicking the browse (…) button, it tries to perform a group calculation operation prior to showing the lookup results. If you have a lot of users in the database, this calculation can take a long time and lead to slowness in user lookups.
If you run into slowness while performing user lookups on these fields, you have the following two options:
1. The “Global Operators Group” group membership can have a static list of members or have dynamic membership based on specific criteria. An example of dynamic membership criteria could be ‘include all users where the user’s department is equal to ‘IT’. Most customers use it to limit the scope of assigned to users to just those people that could reasonably have an incident/service request assigned to them. As an example, Joe in the HR department is not likely to have an incident assigned to him so there is no point in including him in the list of people to search in when assigning an incident.
2. If you do not intend to use this functionality then simply deleting the group “Global Operators Group” found under Library ->Groups will revert back to V1 functionality. In other words it will revert back to Service Manager 2010 functionality.
Note: The group “Global Operators Group” is stored in a management pack. Before you delete the group “Global Operators Group”, please backup the management pack “Service Catalog Generic Incident Request” by exporting it out from the Administration\Management Packs view. That way if you delete the group “Global Operators Group” and want to use this functionality again, you can simply re-import the management pack “Service Catalog Generic Incident Request” to restore the “Global Operators Group” feature.