ServiceDesk

Hi All,

I'm having trouble with the migration as it won't accept any credentials to login to the notification server so I was just wondering whether there's a way of manually migrating the incidents from our current Altiris helpdesk 6.5 over to Service Desk 7?  
 I don't want to affect/break the current setup so I want to test the migration first.  Basically, I want to simulate the migration.
I thought I could just point the migration wizard to the a database which I backed up and restored but you can't, it needs to connect to the NS.

Any ideas would be great!!

You could always run the workflow package for the import manually.

Also, while it may be fixed now, in the initial release there was an upper limit of about 300 categories that it would import. This was NOT changeable eat the time as it was embedded in one of the custom DLL's.
 
If that is still the case and that limit hasnt been removed yet, you can look at how the workflow is being done, and create your own without that limitation, if you bought a license for WF developer.

I ended up doing it via SQL..

Thanks for the reply Nurb,

Sorry.. I'm a complete noob to all this, it took me about 2 weeks to finally it install it without errors.
OK, i just installed the workflow designer since I didn't opt to install it at first.  If I could trouble you a bit more, what workflow package do I run?  Where do I find it.  has someone documented or explained the procedure somewhere? 

I haven't looked into WF designer at all at this point, but I'll start googling tomorrow, hopefully someone out there can shine some light on it!!

SD.CategoryMigrationWizard is what we tried to use.  When i ran into the 300 limit, i just ended up manually moving my categories over VIA SQL as i have 2000 categories.

Hi Nurb,
Any chance you could describe the steps you took to do this?  I opened up the SD.CategoryMigrationWizard project in workflow designer hoping that it would make sense and was easy to understand but it's a bit beyond my understanding..

If you look at the project properties you will see where you put in the NS server that you have HD6 on. From that point it should just be a matter of running the project ( debug mode should be good enough )

I would suggest backing up your database first of course, in case it imports a bunch of garbage and breaks things :)

If that doesnt work, which it didnt for me due to the limit the coders left in the library, i exported all my current v6 categories, then modified them to fit the new format ( its not that wierd, just look at the sample data and it should be pretty clear ), then blew away the sample data and imported the my v6 categories.  All this was done at the SQL level completly outside of workflow.

Hrmm.. You make it sound so easy.  I'll have a go at it when I find time.  My priorities have been moved to getting SCCM up and running but this has been bugging me for a while.  I really appreciate all your help so far.

When you say 'database', do you ,mean the NS7 database ?  Or the HD6 one?  I've already made a backup of the HD6 one and am currently struggling to get data off of it.  But it makes sense to backup the blacnk NS7 one and work off that.

Service desk stuff actually goes into the "Ensemble" database, but backing up the NS7 db( symantec_cmdb) doesnt hurt either.

It wont modify v6, so no need to back that stuff up any more then you already do.

Hi Nurb, 

I had a look at it tonight and I'm really baffled !!  I've put in the username/password and Server IP in the properties and tried to run it but it didn't seem to go anywhere or do anything.. it did launch the debugging window though but am I supposed to step through the entire process?  Also, do I put anything into the Ensemble URL property in properties?

I really appreciate your help so far mate!

If you click the composer.aspx it will run the project from beginning to end, unless you added breakpoints of course. 

Until you do that it didnt actually run ( if i understand correctly ) For what its worth, I forgot this video was out there: http://www.screencast.com/users/nmitchelmore/folders/Default/media/6058c9c0-dbae-4ec6-833d-e6345710293e

Hi Nurb,
 
Thanks for the link, i've read the documentation which describes exactly what they've shown there.  My problem is that I can't connect to the NS service, it keeps telling me that the credentials are incorrect.  I've tried every possible combination in the server and domain fields eg. server.domain.com.au and ipaddress.domain.com.au without any success, which is why i'm resorting to trying to connect to it manually.

We used the same service account on both 6 and 7 to install with, ( and are local admin accounts on all Altiris/Symantec servers ) perhaps that helped us avoid that problem?

Hrmm.. I've tried the account that runs the notification server service and i've also added this account and the NS7 computer account as local admin as well.  i can't help but think that there's something wrong with NS6 despite the fact that it's running smoothly.

Have you tried the Workflow Designer Notification Server Credentials Tool?

Hi Andy,

No, I don't even know where to find that.  What does it do?  I'm assuming that it's the in the programs menu.. I'll take a look there when I get back Monday.