It’s hard to believe that it has been more than a year ago that I originally released the CodePlex solution for basic incident SLA management for SCSM. The solution was originally intended to be primarily an example of how to create custom Windows Workflow Foundation workflow activities for Service Manager. As long as I was providing an example, I figured I might as well build something useful. One of the things that customers often told us is that they wanted to be able to easily identify incidents which had breached the target resolution time (or were about to breach). They also wanted to be able to send notifications in those cases and potentially escalate or route the incidents by applying templates. This relatively simple solution simply runs a query on a periodic basis to find all incidents that have breached their target resolution time and marks them SLA Status = Breached or Warning (if the target resolution time is within a configurable window of time in the future). Administrators can then set up views and other workflows based on that property having a value of Warning or Breached.
Since then this solution has been downloaded from CodePlex 1,111 times and the original blog post has been viewed more times than any other blog post on this blog! Clearly this is an important topic for you all! Hopefully the solution has been useful to many of you. I haven’t spent any time since the original release adding more features or fixing bugs because:
1) We have a partner, Cased Dimensions, that has a great solution in this area and I wanted to encourage customers to use that because it is better tested, more complete, and it is officially supported by Cased Dimensions.
2) We are going to include more advanced SLA management functionality in SCSM 2012. More details on that will come out soon.
3) I’ve been busy building other solutions like the Exchange connector, the portal source code release, the data model diagram in Visio, and doing lots of other things.
4) The project is available as a CodePlex solution meaning that anybody that really wanted to could take the source code and add whatever features or changes they wanted to it, potentially contributing the resulting solution back to the community on CodePlex.
I have had a few reports of it not working recently though. I think this might be because the original DLLs were built with SCSM 2010 (not SP1) binaries and pre-RTM versions of the authoring tool binaries. There was also a bug that was pointed out very early on that prevented using this solution on a management server that was running with local settings other than EN-US. This new release has been tested on 2010 SP1 and that datetime formatting bug has been fixed. I haven’t added any new features for the reasons outlined above. I also haven’t fixed any other bugs since I don’t have a way to reproduce any of the issues reported by others on the CodePlex site.
Just a reminder that although this solution is built by a Microsoft employee (me) it is not something that is officially supported by Microsoft. If it works for you, great! If it doesn’t, sorry, but please report the issue in detail on the CodePlex site and I’ll see if I can fix it.
Here’s the link to download the latest version – 0.3. For those of you already running the solution, the upgrade process is simply a matter of replacing a few DLLs on the management server. Please see the ReadMe.txt in the download package for clean install and upgrade instructions.
http://scsmincidentsla.codeplex.com/releases/view/68887