I was wondering if anyone else was having some issues with coming up with the Operational Categories and Product Categories in ITSM 7 ? It requires to rethink the who CTI issue since you now have two separate hirarchical menu structures to deal with compared to the old CTIs and BMC/Remedy is not much help with the little sample data they provide.
I also don't see how they can claim to now have 5 levels of Product Categories considering that Product Name and Model/Version are pretty much set. If you look at the data that the DSL installs, it seems like they were just 'padding' the Product Categories as it does not make a lot of sense to have Software -> Application -> Thirdparty -> Microsoft xxx Why not just Software -> Microsoft xxx or Software -> Microsoft Apps -? Word/Excel/etc. ? All three tiers are required and the recommendation is to use '- None -' for tiers that do not need data. I am still a little bit unclear on how the Product Categories, Product library, DSL and CMDB relate together, especially for hardware. On our demo system I started adding some hardware in the following manner: Hardware -> Laptop -> - None - Hardware -> Laptop -> Memory Hardware -> Laptop -> Video Card Hardware -> Desktop -> - None - Hardware -> Desktop -> Floppy Drive etc. The question is, how to tie in Product Name and Model/Version ? Hardware -> Laptop -> - None - -> Latitude D600 If I have all the individual components in Tier 3, I would have to have a product called 'Latitude D600' for each component, meaning I would have to duplicate the product about 20 times. The components are the same for each laptop, desktop, etc. so it would be nice if I only needed them once. An option would be to add the components under the Operational Categories and not list them under the Product Categories: Failure -> Laptop -> - None - Failure -> Laptop -> Memory etc. Any insight, recommendation and best practice would be appreciated. Rgds, Chris PS: BMCs definition of the two categories is as follows: Creating Operational Categories Operational categories list all the operational services that a typical help desk provides, such as add user account, and change server password. It can also contain items that represent symptoms of incidents or problems, such as application failure and network failure. Each operational category must be unique. Creating Product Categories Products can be any items used by an organization and are usually IT- related. Products are typically used to classify a configuration item, an incident, a problem, or a change request. The Product Categorization structure is defined as Tier 1 > Tier 2 > Tier 3 > Product Name and Manufacturer > Model Version, which is used to categorize different products or configuration items in BMC Atrium CMDB. Before creating or modifying product information, it is important to understand product relationships. # When creating product category information, you must complete all three tiers. The product name or manufacturer field is optional, but both are required if either is specified. One tier can be sufficient, depending on the item being created. If you create a product where only one tier is required, the other two tiers can be set to None. # Each product category can have more than one product model/version. # Products can be associated with one or more companies. Each product category must be unique. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at http://www.wwrug.org
