As promised at MMS2009 and posted at: http://blogs.technet.com/servicemanager/archive/2009/05/06/
system-center-service-manager-test-drive-now-available.aspx
The Service Manger Product Team has released a new hosted VM environment for customers to get familiar with System Center Service Manager without having to build a lab environment. Since the CTP2 release is only in the hands of TAP customers this is the only avenue until later in the summer for customers to evaluate this product.
What is SCSM?
A new Microsoft System Center product, System Center Service Manager is being designed to meet the needs of the modern IT help desk. By providing powerful new capabilities for incident, problem, asset, and change management, System Center Service Manager will support organizations as they seek to improve the service they provide to their users. This product will become the hub of IT management, IT technical and end user touch within the System Center Product Suite.
System Center Service Manager is still on schedule for a 1HCY10 release. As per MMS announcements licensing will be thru the new Client Management Suite or E-Cal and SMSE suite for servers, as well as available as individual CALs.
Per the Post:
We’ve put together a hosted virtual machine environment for you to test drive System Center Service Manager!
http://www.microsoftservicemanagertestdrive.com/
You can access it through a browser and even save state so you can come back to it later! We’ve put together a demo walkthrough step-by-step guide to give you a quick tour of the product. The virtual environment has hosted VMs for System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration Manager so you can evaluate the integration between all of these System Center products.
The version of Service Manager hosted in this virtual environment is the "CTP2" version which has only been released to TAP customers/partners until now. This version is available to the public only in the hosted environment and is not downloadable from Connect. Please use this opportunity to take a look at all the new features that have been added since the Public Beta and provide us feedback on the Service Manager Forum.
New features for the CTP2 release include:
- Operations Manager integration (CI Connector, Alerts to Incidents, Distributed Applications to Service Maps)
- Link back to OM web console for diagnosis resolution using alert view, knowledge, tasks, and health explorer
- Role-based security and user experience
- Knowledge management and full-text search
- New setup with consistent System Center experience
- New Data Warehouse/Reporting infrastructure capabilities
- PowerShell administration cmdlets
- Reports runnable from within Service Manager console
- More reports (Incident Resolution, Incidents by Analyst)
- Change request workflows & activity templates
- Activity management
- Inbound email to incident creation
- CSV Import
- Database grooming
The next public release is scheduled for late summer/early fall.
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 