How to get the Service Manager 2012 Self-service portal running on Sharepoint 2013

This blog post is written by my collegaue Nicklas Halme from Microsoft Consulting Services in Finland.

Great Work Nicklas :-)

 

 NOTE! The following steps are not a supported method and should ONLY be used for lab / testing purposes !!!

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I ran into a situation that my customer wanted to use only Windows Server 2012 in their environment and also wanted to implement the System Center Service Manager 2012 Self-service Portal. Thanks to my awesome Service Manager community at Microsoft I was able to get it to work.

Since this Service Manager 2012 does not yet officially support SharePoint 2013 I had to modify the Service Manager installer procedure to look for SP2013 installation instead of SP2010. I also needed to recreate the SharePoint site collection that Service Manager initially created and use the SharePoint 2010 experience instead.

NOTE! The following steps are not a supported method and should be used for lab / testing purposes only!!

After I had installed the SP2013 Foundation and the English language pack for SharePoint 2013 Foundation on Windows Server 2012 I did the following steps:

1. Extract the Service Manager 2012 SP1 media to a folder

2. Checked the SP 2013 Component GUID from the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\

3. Modified the PrerequisiteInputFile.xml (<SCSM_extracted_media>\Setup\en.) to reference SP 2013 Component GUID for SP prerequisite check

a. Look for Check Order=41. You may change the Title and descriptions texts if you want. The highlighted GUID is for SP2013 Foundation.

b. Look for Check Order=46 and do the same GUID modifications

4. Uninstalled .NET 3.5 to force start all MSI CustomAction with CLR 4.0, that will load latest version of SP assembly from Global Assembly Cache (GAC).

5. Created a SetupWizard.exe.config file for SetupWizard.exe to be able to start it using CLR 4.0

a. Open notepad and paste the following:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
   <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">
      <supportedRuntime version="v4.0.30319"/>
      <!-- supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727"/ –>
   </startup>
</configuration>

b. save the file as SetupWizard.exe.config

6. Copied the file to the .\Setup\ -folder

7. Modified the SM.msi (.\Setup\Server\) to bypass .NET 3.5 and IIS7.0 verification in LaunchConditions action. I removed action from sequence using ORCA (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa370557(v=vs.85).aspx)

a. Dropped both [NeedDotNet35] and [NeedISS7] rows from the MSI

b. Saved the changes

8. Used .\Setup\SetupWizard.exe to start installation instead of Setup.exe to bypass .NET 3.5 verification.

 

 

 

 

 

9. Installed SCSM SharePoint Web Parts application to SP2013 server. In my case I had dedicated server for the SP Web Parts and another box for the Content location server

10. After the installation completed successfully verified that feature name SMPortalSharepointSiteFeatures subfolder exists in folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES

11. Opened SharePoint Central Administration as administrator

12. Clicked on Application Management link

13. Clicked on Delete a site collection link

14. From the Site Collection dropdown menu selected the Change Site Collection

15. From Select Site Collection – Webpage Dialog windows selected the site Service Manager created

16. Clicked Delete

17. Created a new site collection by clicking the Create site collection –link

a. Gave title and description like SMPortal

b. From Select experience version dropdown menu selected 2010

c. Selected Team Site as the template for the site collection

d. Added required user to site collection admin

18. Browsed to the new site and verified it works (ignored possible certification error and fixit later on with this info https://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/05/04/faq-why-is-my-self-service-portal-service-catalog-blank.aspx).

19. Opened Sharepoint PowerShell as administrator

20. Executed the following command:
Stsadm -o activatefeature -name SMPortalSharepointSiteFeatures -url [URL TO SMPORTAL site collection e.g.: https://servername:443]

21. Navigated to url [https://servername:443/<THE GIVEN SITE NAME e.g. SMPortal>]

22. Now you should have a Service Manager 2012 Self-service Portal running on SharePoint 2013

Big thanks goes to to my Microsoft colleagues; Andrii Malinovskyi for the help to bypass the prerequisites checks and Jaakko Nikko to help me to repair the site in SharePoint 2013.