While working with customers to better map out their use of the Microsoft products that they are licensed for, the conversation always drifts to System Center Service Manager and Orchestrator because they are the two products I like talking about most. 🙂
One of the most common questions I get asked is “What’s the future of Service Manager and Orchestrator?”
This was always a hard question to answer because Microsoft have been rather tight lipped about the products and what their futures are….. until now!
In a recent blog post, Chris Howie wrote about the SCSM Roadmap and future and mapped out exactly what is on the cards for the two beloved products.
In short, SCSM and Orchestrator (Along with Data Protection Manager, Virtual machine Manager and Operations Manager) will be moving to the same “Semi-Annual” release cycle as System Center Configuration Manager was more than 2 years ago.
Chris Howie put it perfectly:
Why is this important? By releasing these products more frequently, the rest of System Center can now leverage the development agility that Configuration Manager has – meaning additional features and fixes released more frequently. On the flip side of that, this means the roadmap fundamentally changes as well. If features and fixes are being released semi-annually, it makes sense that the next set of features have about the same visibility. This means that the days of 3 year roadmaps for any System Center product are gone.
What does this mean for you? System Center Service Manager and Orchestrator are still being developed and are part of this new release cycle along with the rest of System Center. Some semi-annual updates will only have fixes and some will have additional functionality. The features that get added to the entire suite each cycle will depend on customer demand and will be prioritized as such. The products which receive enhancements will likely vary each time. All products are therefore still fully supported.
What you may have also missed is another post on the Microsoft Hybrid Cloud blog back in June 15th 2017. The Microsoft Windows Server Team wrote about this faster release cadence but only in general terms, but one cool item that was buried in this post was the fact that:
We also recently announced the ability to send incident data to Service Manager from Azure.
Now that’s cool.
The one thing that we can do as fans of System Center is to participate in the System Center Tech Community and UserVoice forums to provide feedback to the product teams to help influence what is release in the upcoming releases.
Please keep it coming Microsoft.