• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Carbon60

Carbon60

The Managed Cloud Difference

  • Show Search
  • Contact Us
  • Get Started
Hide Search
  • Cloud Adoption
    Cloud Adoption

    Starting or continuing on your cloud journey — whether public, private or hybrid — is a complex undertaking. But no matter your company size or industry, our cloud consulting experts can help with end-to-end solutions to plan, migrate and operate your business in the cloud.

    • Cloud Readiness Assessment

      Chart a new course for your IT environment with a Cloud Readiness Assessment. With a proven process, we take into consideration your technology, people and business strategy and tailor a public, private or hybrid cloud environment that will set your organization up for success.

      Learn more
    • Cloud Migration Services

      Cloud migration can transform your business and give you a competitive edge – when done properly. Our cloud experts will help you move complex workloads to the right cloud environment, the right way – tailored for your specific needs.

      Learn more
    • Cloud Launchpad
    • Modernization
    • Cloud Security & Compliance
  • Managed Cloud
    Managed Cloud

    Get the most out of the cloud and keep your IT team out of the weeds. Gain predictability and control around security, compliance, agility, reliability, performance – and cost – by tapping into our standard-setting managed cloud services.

    • Managed Private Cloud

      Safe, stable, fast, compliant, secure and fully managed – get a reliable and data sovereign cloud infrastructure platform for your applications.

      Learn more
    • Managed Public Cloud

      Experience matters. Whether you choose Managed AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, we can take care of the heavy lifting while you focus on your business.

      Learn more
    • Cloud Backup
    • Cloud Disaster Recovery
    • Security
    • Managed Public Cloud
    • Cloud Disaster Recovery
    • Applications
  • Industries
    Industries

    When it comes to financial services, healthcare, public sector and technology – there is simply no room for error or uncertainty when it comes to data security and compliance. There are specific and important considerations that we are well-versed in navigating. We’re trusted by governments and organizations to safely house mission-critical functions every day.

    • Financial Services

      Increase go-to-market speed, while meeting SOC2, PCI-DSS and OSFI B10 regulatory and organizational obligations.

      Learn more
    • Healthcare

      Get secure, scalable high-performance data, while improving the patient experience and addressing every compliance and privacy requirement.

      Learn more
    • Public Sector
    • Technology
  • Partners
    Partners

    Simply put – the right technology and the right platform is the one that’s right for your business. We’re highly certified and experienced in the major public clouds – so regardless of complexity, customization or preference – we’re well-equipped to have your back every step of the way.

    • AWS

      AWS Premier Partner with 100+ AWS certifications and counting.

      Learn more
    • Microsoft Azure

      Gold Microsoft Azure Partner with core competencies and certifications.

      Learn more
    • Google Cloud
    • VMware
  • Insights
    Insights

    Sharing knowledge and expertise is a big part of how we’ve evolved - and how we help our customers.

    • Blog

      Stay up to date with the latest trends and developments in the fast-moving world of digital transformation.

      Read
    • Events

      Make sure to join us for our next event and connect with cloud experts who have a lot to share.

      Attend
    • Resources

      Your toolkit to do a deeper dive with case studies, info sheets, checklists and more.

      Explore
  • About
    About

    We’re on a mission to bring digital transformation to more businesses, by making forward-thinking cloud strategy – and high-performance cloud services – more accessible.

    • Leadership

      Meet the leadership team who are driving our vision forward.

      Learn more
    • About Carbon60

      Learn more about who we are, and how we help our customers evolve with confidence.

      Learn more
    • Careers
    • News
  • Contact Us
  • Get Started

Creating custom tasks in System Center Service Manager (SCSM) to send email notifications

October 31, 2013

Sending email notifications regarding a working item in System Center Service Manager is a common requirement that doesn’t really exist out of the box. Travis had published, a while ago, a plug-in called “SCSM SendEmail”. This plug-in though filling that gap, still was missing some of the common requirements:

    • Supporting only Incident – you cannot send email notifications about a service request
    • Adding new email template required a new workflow and manual updates to the management pack XML, which means the end user cannot do it alone
    • There is no way to send notifications to email addresses that do not exist in the SCSM user list. In my environment, for example, I needed to send the notifications to all the email addresses in a specific field of the work item
    • Does not provide a way to “Set First Response” or change the work item status to “Pending”
    • It has some multi users/messages reliability issues:
  • When you are trying to send the same message content again, even if you are changing the template, it will not send it and there will be no indication that the message was not sent
  • When you are trying to send a second message while the work item is open in the console, the first message will not be sent and there will be no indication as well
  • When you are trying to send a second message while the work item is not open in the console and before the previous sending workflow has been started, it will send two emails but both with the content of the second message

All these issues forced me to develop a custom solution (When I started to work on this, Travis’s project was part of the exchange connector and was not published as an open source).

I built the console task “Send notification” and a supporting workflow, using the “SendEmail Activity” that I showed in my previous post, which solved all of the above problems and also allowed the console user to choose between the affected user and the assigned user as the email recipient.

When you select “Affected Contacts” or “Both” as a recipient the email will be sent to the affected user and to any email address in the “alternate contact” field.

The templates drop-down list shows all the email templates that relate to an incident/service request depending on the current item type, this way any end user, with the right permissions, can simply add more templates and with no delay start using them.

In case the user tries to send a second message before the first one was sent, he will get a popup message to try again in a few seconds.

The solution contains two management packs:

C60.Incident.Notification.mpb –

  • Contains the types’ extension to incident and service request. I’m using the same extension field’s names as in Travis’s solution, adding one extra filed called “MessageToAssignedUser” that sets the notification recipient
  • Contains the “Send Notification” Console Task and a supported assembly. The package also hides the out of the box “Mark as first response” and “Request User Input” console tasks
  • Contains empty email templates (the email body will include just the message from the dialog box) for incident and service requests that will be used when the user chooses “No Template” in the templates combo

C60.Incident.Notification.WF.xml –

  • Contains two workflows (one for incident and one for service request) that do the actual sending. Here is the workflow as shown in the authoring tool:

The workflow’s trigger condition is when a work item’s “MessageTemplateId” field is updated from null to a different value. When executed, the workflow checks the “MessageToAssignedUser” field and based on its value sets the notification recipients:

  • True – will send the notification to the assigned user
  • False – will send the notification to the affected user / contacts
  • Null – will send the notification to the assigned user and the affected user / contacts

After the send email activity, the workflow will clear the “MessageTemplateId” field.

To deploy the solution, just import both packages using the SCSM console and copy the content of the “SCSMExtension” folder to the SCSM folder (%ProgramFiles%Microsoft System Center 2012Service Manager). The “SCSMExtension” folder contains an assembly for each workflow and my custom workflow activity assembly.

To open the workflows in the authoring tool you will need to deploy the custom workflow activities as described in my previous post.

Get the source code and binaries for this article here

IT Advice SCSM, System Center Service Manager

Subscribe to receive Carbon60 news

Stay up to date on insights, blog articles, events and services from Carbon60 delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe
Carbon60
  • Cloud Adoption
    • Cloud Readiness Assessment
    • Cloud Migration Services
    • Cloud Launchpad
    • Modernization
    • Cloud Security & Compliance
  • Managed Cloud
    • Managed Private Cloud
    • Managed Public Cloud
    • Cloud Backup
    • Cloud Disaster Recovery
    • Security
    • Applications
  • Industries
    • Financial Services
    • Healthcare
    • Public Sector
    • Technology
Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on Twitter Follow us on YouTube

© Copyright Carbon60 2023

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Contact Us