Ways to populate the Product Catalog

You can populate the Product Catalog in the following ways:

• Manually add product entries

 You can create new companies or products, versions, and patches from the Product Catalog Console, and define their status.

 For more information, see Adding Product Catalog entries.

• Import data using Atrium Integrator jobs

 Based on your input source type (for example CSV, XML, or DB ), you must design and run an Atrium Integrator job to import the data. For more information, see Transferring data from external datastores to BMC CMDB.

• Import data using UDM (Unified Data Management )
  Use the Data Management tool which includes predefined templates to import data into the Product Catalog. See  Data Management  in Remedy ITSM suite online documentation.
  
  

• Use Normalization Engine to create product entries

 If you import data from Atrium Integrator or any other external sources, then use Normalization Engine to populate the Product Catalog. For guidelines and procedures, see Configuring the Product Catalog for normalization.

 When using Normalization Engine to create product entries, verify that the CIs in the BMC CMDB dataset contain the appropriate values for the ManufacturerName, Model, Category, Type, and Item attributes. Make sure that all CIs for a specific product have the same values for these attributes; otherwise, Normalization Engine is likely to create duplicate entries for a product in the Product Catalog. If you have duplicates in the Product Catalog, you must remove them manually.

  If you implement software license management, evaluate the VersionNumber and MarketVersion values of software CIs. Before normalizing the CIs and creating new Product Catalog entries, create Version Rollup rules to map related VersionNumber values to a single MarketVersion value. For more information, see Managing software licenses in your organization using normalization.