System Center 2012 Service Manager (RC) Self Service Portal Installation

This blog post is basically the continuation of my previous blog post which describes my installation experience of System Center Service Manager (aka SCSM) 2012 (Release Candidate). In SCSM 2012 the self-service-portal, which can be used by users to log an incident or submit a service request, is now SharePoint based.

Again, since this is a LAB environment, I install SharePoint and the Self-Service-Portal on my Service Manager management server. In a production environment you should carefully plan your deployment and place the SharePoint server somewhere near your users.

Part 1: Installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 (which is Free!)

You can download SharePoint 2010 Foundation from here:http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5970

SP1 for SharePoint 2010 can be found here:http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26640
On my Service Manager management server, I start the SharePoint installation and select “Install software prerequisites”:

The nice thing about the installer is that it takes care of all requirements (like IIS, SQL components, etc.):

Accept the license agreement:

And let the installer do its magic:

After that you might need to restart the machine before you can go ahead and install SharePoint Foundation:

Again, a license agreement:

Next screen asks us for the installation type we want:

We select “Standalone” which immediately starts the installation process:

After the installation is complete, keep the checkbox ticked to start the configuration wizard:

The wizard will start in a new window and after clicking Next, you may be asked to restart the services in order to continue:

Didn’t do much but after a while you get:

After you click on Finish, the SharePoint site should open up in your browser.
Before we go ahead and install the Service Manager components, let us apply SP1 for SharePoint Foundation. Start sp1 .exe, accept the license agreement to apply the service pack:

Part 2: Installing the Service Manager Web Portal

Once again, start the Service Manager 2012 setup.exe and select Service Manager web portal:

The first thing we get asked by the wizard is which Portal Parts we want to install:

The web content server is the “middle-tier” between your service manager installation and the SharePoint front-end server. I guess calling it Web Portal Application server would have been a better name (at least for my understanding).
The SharePoint Web Parts are the “front-end” parts you need to install on top of SharePoint. Since we are installing a very compact lab environment, we choose to install both and click on Next:

And another license agreement. We leave the installation location with the default values:

The Prerequisites checker looks fine:

The next screen allows us to configure the portal web site:

Note: I enabled SSL and used the default self-signed certificate of my windows server.
Enter the database server name and select the Service Manager database in the next screen:

Once again we get warned that we use an unsupported collation:

Configure the self-service portal user account:

The next screen will create a SharePoint portal site for the Service Manager self-service portal:

On the next screen we need to setup the user account used for the application pool:

The next two screens are about the Customer Experience Program and the summary page. After that the installation starts and once finished you should see something like this:

Ok, so everything is installed but if you’ve installed it the same way I have, you will soon find out that the Service Manager portal is blank and not working. I will publish another blog post, showing you how to resolve the issue.