SCSM View Manager

Hello everyone,

I was recently asked to create a tool that will allow our SCSM Administrators to more quickly and efficiently manage the Views and folders on SCSM, particularly speaking Cireson Views/Folders. The root cause was that they are on the plans of restructuring the company’s structure and the effort would take a long time with the built in methods.

My first thought was to create PowerShell scripts to automate this task, but they asked me if it was possible to create a GUI application for this instead. I was a bit hesitant at first because with GUIs you are normally bound to have to baby sit the user a lot more than with a cmdlet where the user normally has to perform their own research before being able to do much. Never the less I agreed, and here are the fruits of this work.

The application works by gathering the information from the exported Management Pack XML file, and making changes to it. It is fully developed in PowerShell working with PowerShell Studio 2015 (now 2016 edition) and I’ll get the source code into GitHub later this week.

The application has different features:

Folder Features:

• Create a new Folder: this function is currently configured to create a Cireson folder but this can be easily modified or even a new function can be added to determine if you want to make a Cireson folder or a regular folder. (It goes without saying that you do need to have the Cireson suite installed or it won’t work) 
• Create a new folder from template: this function will prompt you for a new name, and then will search for and clone the folder named ‘TemplateFolder’ as well as all subfolders and subitems. The function will then attempt to replace “TemplateFolder” with the new provided name on all of the created items. If a ‘TemplateFolder’ is not found then the function will fail and an error will be send out. 
• Current Template folder example: 

• Rename Folder: This function will prompt you for a new name and rename the name of the folder in the DisplayString XML Element 
• Delete Folder: This function will delete the currently selected folder, and all of its subfolders and views, from the XML file. 
• Removed Elements: 
• <Categories> 
• <Folder> 
• <FolderItems> 
• <ImageReference> 
• <DisplayString> 
• Clone Folder: This function will clone the folder into the same parent folder along with all of its subfolders and views.

View Features:

• Copy View: This function will prompt you for a new name and copy the view with the new name and all of its properties to the same parent location. 
• Delete View: This function will delete the currently selected view from the XML File. 
• Removed Elements: 
• <Categories> 
• <View> 
• <FolderItem> 
• <ImageReference> 
• <DisplayString> 
• Rename View: This function will prompt you for a new name, and rename the View in the DisplayString XML Element.

Other Features:

• The program also allows you for you to be able to drag and drop folders and views to any location. 

Requirements: 

• This programs requires that you have Windows PowerShell 4.0 or above installed.

All of the changes that are performed are automatically saved to the XML file, so make sure you make a backup before you start making changes if you are not able to quickly export it.

I hope you’ll let me know what you think, if you have any other ideas, issues or concerns.

Download path:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zmhvikam8snjv81/SCSM%20View%20Manager.exe?dl=0

I have made a new respository for this on GitHub that you can find here:
https://github.com/Jonatan-B/SCSMViewManager

Kind regards,
Me.