Custom Service Request Area

There is an issue that has been around for some time were you cannot delete items from the Service Request Area list in Service Manager 2012. You can do this to the Incident Classification and Change Area but not the Service Request Area.

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See references to this issue here:

Incident Management, Change Management, and Service Requests were developed at different times by different groups. The Service Requests were built with the Area list in a sealed management pack making it so that the items in this list cannot be removed only renamed. Renaming these items does not work for every Service Manager deployment. The Service Requests was built that way and this won’t be changing. There are ways around this issues through customizations.

The typical IT professional does not want to learn the authoring tool, or how to edit SQL directly or pick up Visual Studio for a simple task such as clearing out a list. The typical IT professional just wants an easy way to make the modifications they need to the list and continue on with their Service Manager project.

I had to jump in an customize this list. What I wanted to do was make this portable so that other IT Pros in the community do not have to learn how to customize Service Manager for a simple task like this. I have packaged my customization. I called it Custom Service Request Area (CSRA) and made it available for download on TechNet gallery here:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Custom-Service-Request-e4d40738

I packaged this in a way that allows you to back up your custom list in the event something happens to Service Manager and you need to re-deploy you can just import back in and not lose anything. I also tried to package this in a way that it future proof on newer versions as they come out.

It comes with a setup guide that consists of 5 steps on how to drop this customization into your Service Manager. After dropping this in you will have a list  that you can control that will look like this:

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Special thanks to some of my System Center friends for letting me bounce ideas off you around this.

  • Sam Erskine Author of System Center Service Manager 2012 Cookbook
  • Andreas Baumgarten System Center MVP and Author of System Center Service Manager 2012
    Cookbook
  • Rob Ford System Center MVP and Developer at Cireson

Please keep in mind this is a FREE un-supported community effort and should be tested in a lab environment before using in any production environment. Use at your own risk.

If you have any feedback please leave a comment.

***UPDATE 3-31-2014***

Here is a blog that covers custom Service Request Area and Outriggers. This post details the steps to get custom Service Request Area to show with meaningful names in PowerPivot reports. Here is the link:
http://www.scutils.com/blog/scutils-blog/system-center-2012/how-to-create-a-custom-service-request-area-and-get-meaningful-values-of-that-in-excel-reports-part-2

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2 thoughts on “Custom Service Request Area”

  1. Hi Steve,

    I imported your sealed management pack “Custom Service Request
    Area (CSRA) v3”. It is working without any issues. Thank you for providing it for the community.

    I recently needed to extend the form to add more properties. But I do not have the key you used to seal the MP. I made the changes and sealed with a new key and try to import it. But it fails with the errors (see below). I am really stuck here and wanted to get some help from you. My supervisor is asking me to add some fields as soon as possible. Looks like the changes need to be sealed by the original key. I am also ready to pay some amount for the work. Please let me know. Because of the dependencies I can not delete this MP either. Please advise. Any help will be highly appreciated.
    ……………………
    The management pack import failed.
    Errors (1):
    The form base is not valid. Form CustomForm_761f42a7_165b_4c1d_8d72_832a88e4ad1b extends form

    Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Applications.ServiceRequest.Forms.ServiceRequestForm, which already has another extension

    (CustomForm_761f42a7_165b_4c1d_8d72_832a88e4ad1b).

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