Today I attended another “Service Desk� session, this time with plenty of XML and InfoPath. The purpose of the sessions was to show how to extend Service Manager. Maybe because of pre beta 1 code, or because it just didn’t work as expected, some of the demos failed but it did not kill my enthusiasm.
Probably the highlight of today’s session was when Marielle, a colleague, asked a quite interesting question. She is rather small so could not reach the phone and behaved as one of those rock stars from the eighties. Her question, “What is your definition from a CMDB?�
The question was related to what content is stored in the Service manager CMDB. The presenters were talking about storing incident and change management data in the CMDB. After some confusion we managed to have a one on one with the CMDB program manager which actually brought the session to a much higher level. Anyway the CMDB stores CI information but Service manager can query more, it could even do SQL joins…
I think we talked about 15 minutes about the Service manager “Federated CMDB� and this talk gave some inside in what Service Manager is doing at the moment, pull down information from different resources into the CMDB and future plans to leave the information where it is and look at the CMDB as a distributed database and use information from other databases in Service manager or somewhere else based on connectors.
I tried to get some information about future plans regarding a connector to Carmine, Virtual Machine Manager because I really think that Virtualization on demand can help the Microsoft Dynamic System Initiative. Sadly enough not a clear answer on that one.
What became clear is that there are plans to really dig into deployment based on DCM information. For example if an application has a DCM policy that defines that the application can only be installed on a clustered server, Service Manager could use this information to find a clustered server and install the application if it find a suitable candidate.
One other nice example mentioned in the talk regarding the possibilities in  Service Manager; suppose you want to order a laptop with specifics specs, you could ask Service Manager “Which laptop has these hardware specs and has the least amount of hardware calls and no battery replacements?�
I am even more excited but have to go to the party, it looks like MS bought part of the town for a partyJ
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