Preventing duplicate reviewers in a Review Activity

Hello,
I've been asked to populate the Reviewers of a Change Request's Review Activites based on the Business Service Owners and Users. I have a runbook to gather the Business Owner, another to get the Business Users, and a runbook to add the user as a reviewer.
All Good.
Issue comes up that a "new" user may already be on the list. The simple solution is to scan through the current list, looking for the incoming user's name. If there isn't a match, add the name to the reviewer's list.
I started with Orchestrator. I have runbook that gathers the reviewers but I don't have a good way to compare the Reviewer's UserName against the UserName of the user I want to Add.
Next try was with a PowerShell script and SMLets. I have the script but I get errors trying the "Invoke-Command". I understood it is best to use the Remote Execution but the Invoke keeps failing on a error with the -ScriptBlock.
It strike me this should be a common enough problem. I am really the only one that thing this is a good idea?
For the Record, the Server OS is Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center, System Center 2012 SP1
Any help is greatly appriciated. I am beginning to think I've lost my mind. ;-)
[Update: Got the PowerShell to run without error. It appears the script area of "Run .NET Script" activity is sensitive to spaces. made the script slightly more difficult to read but now it runs fine. Still interested to know if there
is an Orchestrator solution.]
Ray Watters

Hi,
What's wrong with Orchestrator? Try to compare a unique property of the users (SID, GUID or something like that).
Cheers,
Marat
Site: www.scutils.com Twitter: LinkedIn:
Graveyard:

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Marat
Site: www.scutils.com
Twitter: LinkedIn:
Graveyard:
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http://www.scsm.se/?p=895
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Hi
In my SCSM 2012 for incidents, i am planning to add review activity so that if any approval is required, it can be approved by the line manager for the created user.
But if try to add activity, only manual activity is displayed. I need to add Review activity to an incident.
is it by design that Reviews activity is only for Service request?
regards Sundaresan.C

i think the problem here is that you haven't considered the need all the way though. remember that an incident is a user's report of a problem. what does it mean to have someone approve my report of an outlook problem?
anything that requires approval needs to be a service request, rather then an incident. a service request is a user's request for something; something that can require approval before being delivered.
it make sense to approve my request for a new computer, it doesn't make sense to approve my report that my computer is on fire; but you might want to reference my incident reporting a computer fire as support for my request for a new computer.

Create a view - All Service Requests that contain a Completed Review Activity

In the Service Manager 2012 console, is it possible to create a view that displays Service Requests, with the view criteria being something like as follows:
Service Request status is In Progress
Service Request contains a Review Activity where the Review Activity status is In Progress
My intent is to provide a way for Service Desk Operators to be able to identify requests that are ready for implementation.
From what I'm seeing in the console, this sort of view is not possible as it appears that any view criteria must be derived from the view's target class.

Nothing like a bit of thread necromancy in the morning.
It turns out the solution to this question was quite straight forward (once you know where to look...)
The trick is creating a view based on one of the Service Request combination classes rather than the basic class itself, and then rephrasing my requirement after realising that what I was really after was a view containing Requests that have an In Progress
Manual Activity.
So...open the console, go to Work Items, right click on
Service Request Fulfillment and select Create View
On the General tab, give your view a name and select a Management in which it will be stored.
On the Criteria tab, click Browse to select a specific object class. Change the
Frequently used basic classes filter to Combination classes then enter 'Service Request' in the filter field.
Pick the Service Request and Activity class.
Now when configuring the criteria, you'll notice a little arrow next to the
Service Request class. Click on this arrow to expand the node, and select the
Contains Activity class.
Under the Available properties box, enter 'Status' in the search field. In my environment, I got two Status fields. Each corresponds to a specific Activity class. Select both of them and click
Add.
One of the Criteria will look like 'Contains Activity[Activity]Status'. Keep this one and delete the other from the Criteria box. Change the value to 'Completed'
While we're at it, select the Service Request class and add a criteria for the Service Request Status = 'In Progress'.
Click on the Display tab and select whatever fields you want to display in this view. Click
OK to save this view.
Now go to the Administration workspace and select the
Management Packs node. Export your management pack that contains your view and open the management pack in a text file viewer. Notepad++ works for me...
First search for the string that you used to name your view. It will be found towards the bottom of the MP in a DisplayString element in the LanguagePacks XML element. This element will have an ElementID.
Select the ElementID and search the entire file for this string. You want the instance that resides within a Presentation | Views | View element. From this point, scroll down until you get to a Criteria element. Within the Criteria element you will find
the two Expressions that were entered via the GUI. One of the Expressions corresponds to the Service Request.Status=In Progress criteria, the other corresponds to the Activity.Status=In Progress criteria. We will be changing the Activity criteria so that it
explicitly refers to a Manual Activity.
Identify the Expression that has the Property containing the string 'System.WorkItemContainsActivity'. We will be changing the TypeConstraint attribute of this criteria.
In this line, Replace the string 'System.WorkItem.Activity' with 'System.WorkItem.Activity.ManualActivity'
Save this file and import the management pack into SCSM

Need advice on preventing duplicate entries in People table

Hi,
In my database, I have a "People" table where I store basic information about people e.g. PersonId, FirstName, LastName, Gender, etc.
There will be lots of entries made into this table and I want to prevent duplicate entries as much as humanly possible. I'd appreciate some pointers on what I should do to minimize duplicates.
My primary concerns are:
Duplicate entries for the same person using the person's full name vs. given name e.g. Mike Smith and Michael Smith
Making sure that two separate individuals with identical names do get entered into the table and get their unique PersonId's.
Not even sure how I can even possibly know if two individuals with identical names are two different people without having additional information but I wanted to ask the question anyway.
Thanks, Sam

Thank you all very much for your responses.
There are three separate issues/points here.
It is clear that it is impossible to prevent duplicates using only a person's first, middle and last names. Once I rely on an additional piece of information, then things get "easier" though nothing is bullet proof. I felt that this was self evident but
wanted to ask the question anyway.
Second issue is "potential" duplicates where there are some variations in the name e.g. Mike vs Michael. I'd like a bit more advice on this. I assume I need to create a table to define variations of a name to catch potential duplicates.
The third point is what Celko brought up -- rather nicely too :-) I understand both his and Erland's points on this as typical relational DB designs usually create people/user tables based upon their context e.g. Employees, Customers, etc.
I fundamentally disagree with this approach -- though it is currently the norm in most commercial DB designs. The reason for that is that it actually creates duplicates and my point is to prevent them. I'm going for more of an object based approach in the DB
design where a person is a person regardless of the different roles he/she may play and I see no reason in repeating some of the information about the person e.g. repeating first, last name, gender, etc in both customer and employee tables.
I strongly believe that all the information that are directly related to a person should be kept in the People table and referenced in different business contexts as necessary.
For example, I assign every person a PersonId in the People table. I then use the PersonId as part of the primary key in the Customers or Employees table as well. Obviously, PersonId is also a foreign key in Customers and Employees tables. This prevents the
need for a separate CustomerId and allows me to centralize all the personal data in the People table.
In my opinion this has three advantages:
Prevent duplication of data
Allow global edits e.g. if the last name of a female employee changes, it is automatically updated for her within the context of "Customer" role she may play in the application.
Last but not least, data enrichment where a person may enter additional data about himself/herself in different contexts. For example, in the employee context, we may have the person's spouse information through "Emergency Contacts" which may come handy
within the context of customer for this person.
Having everyone in the People table gives me these three advantages.
Thanks, Sam

Preventing duplicate reviewers in a Review Activity

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