The Service Manager 2012 R2 Self-Service Portal is a SharePoint 2010 website that customers can use to submit requests for service offerings and request offerings using their web browser. The Self-Service Portal leverages Service Manager user roles, meaning that users will be presented with different request and service offerings depending on role membership. Users are able to submit requests and view the status of those requests using the portal. Figure 1 shows the Service Manager 2012 R2 Self-Service Portal.
FIGURE 1 Self-Service Portal
When a user submits a request using the self-service website, the request is forwarded to the Service Manager server where the information submitted through the self-service website is processed. You can publish Service Manager requests and service offerings to the Self-Service Portal. Many organizations use the Self-Service Portal to allow users to submit their own incident tickets as an alternative to contacting the help desk.
This functionality is only the tip of the iceberg. If you integrate Service Manager with other System Center products, such as Operations Manager, Orchestrator, and Virtual Machine Manager, you can offer services that leverage these products through the Self-Service Portal. For example you could create a service offering that:
1. Allows users to request and deploy virtual machines through System Center Virtual Machine Manager, with the details of that request and subsequent deployment all logged within Service Manager.
2. Allows users to put SQL Server databases into protection, or perform self-service recovery by leveraging Service Manager integration with Data Protection Manager and Orchestrator.
3. Allows users to trigger Orchestrator runbooks. Since runbooks can be created to perform almost any task within your organization’s Windows-based infrastructure, you can provide users with the ability, through the Self-Service Portal, to trigger any task for which you can build a runbook.
The Self-Service Portal can be hosted on a separate computer from the Service Manager server. One important thing to note is that you can only use SharePoint 2010 to host the Service Manager 2012 R2 RTM Self-service website. You cannot use SharePoint 2013 to host the Service Manager 2012 R2 RTM self-service website. This is important as you can deploy SharePoint 2010 on a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2, but cannot deploy it on computers running the Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 operating systems. This means that you must deploy at least one computer running Windows Server 2008 R2 with SharePoint 2010 even if all of the other server operating systems in your environment are running Windows Server 2012 R2.
