You can create new custom workflows for Service Manager using the System Center 2012 - Service Manager Authoring Tool. By building custom workflows, you can further automate Service Manager processes. You can download the Service Manager Authoring Tool from Microsoft’s website.
To create a new workflow that runs on a scheduled basis, perform the following steps:
1. In the Service Manager Authoring Tool, select the management pack that will store the workflow or create a new management pack.
2. Right-click Workflows, and click Create. This will launch the Create Workflow Wizard as shown in Figure 1. Provide a name for the workflow. If you want to modify the default values for the workflow, retry intervals and time to run, click Advanced. The maximum time to run must be greater than 60 seconds and less than 24 hours.
FIGURE 1 Create workflow
3. On the Trigger Condition page, select Run At A Scheduled Time Or At Scheduled Intervals as shown in Figure 2 . You can also custom workflows to run in response to database object changes.
FIGURE 2 Trigger condition
4. On the Trigger Criteria page, configure the schedule for running the custom workflow.
5. On the Summary page, click Create.
Once you’ve created the workflow, you can use the Service Manager Authoring Tool to edit the workflow. You do this by dropping and configuring activities in a manner similar to configuring an Orchestrator runbook. Figure 3 shows the Service Manager Authoring Tool.
FIGURE 3 Custom workflow authoring
To add a custom workflow to Service Manager, copy the workflow files, which will have the name of the management pack with the .xml and .dll file name extensions, to the Service Manager installation folder. In the Service Manager console, import the management pack from the Administration workspace. Once imported, you can use the workflow with Service Manager.
