Andrew Barton, one of our IT Service Engineers, runs Service Manager for our internal “Monitoring and Management” team here at Microsoft. This team runs the infrastructure for some of Microsoft’s biggest web properties like Microsoft.com, MSDN/Technet, Windows Update, the various System Center-related online services like Advisor, Global Service Monitor, and much more.
Andrew’s team was an early adopter of Service Manager going back to the beta days of Service Manager 2010. They also were early adopters of the service catalog features in System Center 2012 – Service Manager. They have something like 300+ different request offerings in their service catalog. Because their catalog was so large and was constantly changing they decided to automate the provisioning of that service catalog from an Excel workbook. This is a pretty impressive piece of engineering they’ve put together and now they have documented the whole solution and shared it with the broader community. You can see the blog post about this on the ‘Partner and Customer Solutions’ blog here on TechNet. At the end of that blog post, there is a link to the toolset you can use to do this yourself.
Automating Service Manager Service Request Catalog Deployment through PowerShell and CSV files
Thanks for sharing this great solution with us Andrew!