The series

• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 1: Introduction
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 2: Pre-work
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 3: The work in Orchestrator
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 4: Preparing Work in Service Manager
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 5: Templates
• Creating a service offering through a self-service portal part 6: Create the offerings (this post)

Recap

In the first post we discussed what we are going to do through these series. I showed the result and the high-level overview of what we are going to do in more detail in the different posts.

In the second post we did some pre-work like creating a management pack specific for this solution and a knowledge base article to give some additional “power” to our solution.

The third post handled the workflow that we needed to build in Orchestrator.

The fourth post handled the preparations in Service Manager such as creating a connector and synchronize it.

In the fifth post we created two types of templates.

In this last post, we are going to create the actual offerings for our HR friends…

Ok… Offerings?

Yeah.  Since we are giving our HR friends some services through a self-service portal, we give them a service offering…

To be able to do that, we need to build two “offerings”.  A Service Offering and a Request Offering.  If you are wondering why we need two different offerings, here is the explanation:

A Request Offering is one offer.  It is what we are building here.  A Service Offering could be one Request Offering or multiple offerings together.  So let’s say that we will build more specific request offerings for our HR friends after this one, then we will be able to reuse the Service Offering we are going to build today.

Service Offering

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Service Catalog -> Service Offerings. Then, in the task pane click Create Service Offering

Press Next in the first window of the wizard

Fill in the Title, Category (this is crucial for where you will see it in the portal), overview, description and as usual, make sure that you select the right management pack. Note that I didn’t fill in the language. If you chose a specific language, then this service offering will only be visible if the internet explorer is actually running in that language (so handle with care here )

In the detailed information, you can add SLA and Cost information. This is again something you don’t need to fill in but it gives a lot of added value to your solution.  And this is exactly what decision takers (non-technical) want to see.  This proves that your solution covers everything and is not just another technical solution.

In this window you can add specific services that are related to this offering. Services such as (for example) email that are created in SCSM (maybe through OpsMgr) can be added here.

In the next screen, you can add knowledge articles to this offering. We didn’t create a knowledge article specifically for the service offering but if you had, you would be able to add it here

Now we can add a Request Offering to our Service Offering. Because we didn’t create this yet (this will be our next step) we leave this empty for now

Finally we decide to put this into draft (which then can go through a change process) or just publish it right away with the service offering owner and some notes

Look at the review to see if you made any mistakes and click Create

When the offering has been created, press Close. Please note that you won’t see this in the portal until the first request offering has been made

Create Request Offering

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Request Offerings

In the Tasks Pane, press Create Request Offering

Press Next in the first window of the wizard

Fill in the Title, choose an image (this is a nice add-on and is a quick-win for IT because of the improvement of visibility), add the description and as always, select the correct management pack.

On the same window, press the select template and then choose service request (remember the service request we have created earlier!)

Select the correct service request

Press Next

Now we need to fill in the prompts. The prompts are the questions that the user will get and which he needs to fill in (although the prompts can be required, optional or even just “viewable”)

For more information about the different prompt types: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/11/08/request-offering-wizard-overview.aspx

In our case, we need 3 prompts: The user name, the group name and the reason for this. We are going to configure user name and group name with query results (again, for more info, see above link) and reason as a simple text. The end-result should be that the end-user selects the user, then selects the group, fills in a reason (which will be in the service request ticket) and that the username and groupname get passed to orchestrator

In the next part, we need to configure the prompts. We are going to choose the first one (username) and then select the configure button

A new window appears, and this will allow us to form a query based on a class.

For this case, I want to select the Active Directory User class, but it wasn’t visible in the previous screen. The reason is that by default it goes to frequently used classes. I’ve changed that to All basic classes and now I can choose it. Please note also that there is a combined class which makes this even more powerful

Next step for the query is to configure my criteria. In this case, it is not necessary but you could limit your results here based on many criteria (depending on the class you select)

Third part is what you want to display. Remember that I had to have the DN name for a user in the Orchestrator workflow. If I wanted to make it myself easy, I could show that here, but then the end-user would get confused. So I decided to display the Display Name only

Finally I get some Options to chose.

Because I need to map this to my runbook, I select Add user-selected objects to template object as related items and them choose Add a User to a Group (Runbook Automation Activity) to pass it through to the runbook variables

Do the same for Group Name but now select on Active Directory Group

Now that my prompts are configured, I need to map them. Two of them are already done (because I mapped them before to the runbook but the third one (the reason) still needs to be mapped to a field in the request

Here you can see that I map it on the Service Request and into the notes (as additional information)

Remember the nice knowledge article we build? Well, here it is, just add it to the request offering

And finally we can publish it

Fill in the owner, notes

Review the summary

Finished but not just yet .  One more thing to do, and that is add this specific request offering to the service offering we build before…

Add to Service Offering

In the SCSM console, go to Library -> Service Catalog -> Request offerings.

Select the correct offering and then in Tasks choose Add to Service Offering

Select the correct service offering and press OK. You are done

 

And with that, the series come to an end.  Hope you enjoyed it.

Cheers,

Mike