The role of the Product Catalog
The Normalization Engine uses the Product Catalog to provide a single name for each product and its versions. The Product Catalog provides data for normalization and also stores product signatures. Product Catalog entries are the definitive, or master, names and descriptions of software products and enable the effective management of software licenses in the production environment. Software titles are discovered by products such as BMC Atrium Discovery and BMC BladeLogic Client Automation Configuration Discovery Integration for CMDB. These discovered CIs are normalized by the Normalization Engine, which (after applying Version Rollup and alias rules) compares the CIs against the Product Catalog entries.
The BMC Atrium Product Catalog is a central repository of approved Product Dictionary (PD) entries and Software Library Items (SLIs). It includes a sample of approximately 4000 entries. SLIs reside in a list of URLs that link to the physical locations of all available software packages approved for distribution within your enterprise. The Product Catalog enables you to facilitate software license management and software deployment by adding or modifying PD entries and SLIs.
Remedy Asset Management refers to the Market Version of a product entry to determine whether that Product Catalog entry must have a related software license contract. This feature helps maintain certificates because instead of relating each minor version to the certificate, you can relate only the Market Version of the product to the certificate.
To normalize the MarketVersion attribute for CIs, you can manually specify the Market Version for a product entry in the Product Catalog or use Version Rollup rules in the Normalization Engine.
For more information about the Product Catalog and software license management, see Product Catalog and Software License Management.
For more information about Version Rollup rules and normalization, see Normalization and software license management.