The Problem SharePoint workflows, which are based on Microsoft WF, are a great way to automate processes that require human interaction and can be easily managed through SharePoint designer, without any custom development. But when it comes to automating IT processes, Microsoft provides us with another workflows engine called Orchestrator (part of System center). The […]
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IT Insights
The “Edge/Origin” Cloud: A New Paradigm
Edge/Origin Cloud Hosting: A New Paradigm While reliability, security, performance, and affordability remain the fundamental business objectives of all web hosting solutions, the best way of achieving these objectives continues to change with rapid shifts in web hosting technologies and services. The most recent and hyped change is the emergence of cloud hosting platforms. Unquestionably, […]
Validating User Resources for Deploying a Service Template
The System Center VMM PowerShell module is very rich and contains more than 400 cmdlets, but it is missing some trivial cmdlets IMO that will help determine if a specific user has enough resources to deploy a new virtual machine or a new service template. Initially it sounds like an easy task, just get the […]
Three Rules for SLA Management: Tips for Enterprise SaaS Providers
While working with a SaaS company that delivers medical information to large pharmacy chains, I was reminded of how Service Level Agreement (SLA) management is a challenging and often overlooked part of delivering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This is especially true when these services are aimed at enterprise customers. A number of years ago I wrote a […]
Executing System Center Orchestrator 2012 Runbooks from C#
The Problem: System Center Orchestrator 2012 exposes a data service that enables to query and execute runbooks. But working directly with the data service is like executing a WCF service by manually composing the SOAP messages. There are no type-safe parameters, no intellisense and you need to type the exact path of the runbook or […]