Microsoft Press has been known lately for releasing free, electronic editions of books covering Microsoft products. Usually you'd think a free offering wouldn't amount to much value, but that's not the case here. The free eBooks they have been releasing are just as valuable as any print counterpart you'd find available on Amazon.com.
Microsoft Press has just released a new, free eBook that covers the Runbook feature of System Center 2012 Orchestrator. Orchestrator is product that is part of the full System Center 2012 suite, and it serves to give IT the ability to combined repetitive tasks into an automated solution. Orchestrator truly is the one piece that ties the entire suite together. If you get the impression that is sounds a lot like scripting, you'd be right because one of the pieces of Orchestrator is the Runbook, which stores your automated solutions, including scripts you create. Runbooks are designed to provide a click-click-click type of automation creation. Scripts can be included, but it's architected so that no knowledge of a scripting language is actually needed in most cases.
The book sits at 182 pages, but also has a companion download that includes the scripted examples (PowerShell) from the book and a couple other things.
Here's what you'll find inside the book:
The book download (PDF) is here: System Center: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks
You can grab the companion content here: Designing Orchestrator Runbooks Companion Download
