Quick start for catalog administrators
As a service catalog administrator, you can manage all aspects of your service catalog and extend management capabilities to other members of your team. Review the following features, and follow the links to learn more about the capabilities of this digital service management and delivery platform.
Basic concepts for catalog administrators
- Connector–Connects BMC Digital Workplace Catalog to an external system that fulfills the request.
- Questionnaire–For each service, the questionnaire collects information needed to fulfill the request.
- Workflow–Defines the process to fulfill a service. The most basic workflow sends a single action to an external system for fulfillment.
Process overview for catalog administrators
The following diagram illustrates the basic process for creating a service in BMC Digital Workplace Catalog:
Essential tasks as a catalog administrator
Start with the following tasks:
- Create and publish service catalog items
- Define workflows with conditional questions processing
- Attach questionnaire forms to service workflows
- Provision services
- Entitle users to be able to request services
- Promote services by using banner displays
- Generate reports of service utilization
Create and publish service catalog items
To get started with defining services, you create service catalog items on the Service Management page in BMC Digital Workplace Catalog as shown in the following image:
Define workflows with conditional questions processing
After you add the catalog profile details to a service, you can create a workflow in the workflow designer, which is a visual tool based on Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN) standards.
You start creating a workflow by dragging and dropping workflow elements onto the canvas, and configuring the process mandatory details. You can design custom workflows to be simple or complex, using conditions that add or remove questions based upon the end-user's responses to the service questionnaire.
The following animated video shows an example of how you would create a process workflow:
Attach questionnaire forms to service workflows
Service catalog administrators and internal service suppliers can create question forms for BMC Digital Workplace users to complete when submitting requests. Questionnaires share a many to one relationship with workflows. Different services can display unique question sets which are associated with the same workflow. Be aware that when you delete a workflow, all questions associated with that workflow are deleted as well.
Provision services
Business end users can request services through the enhanced catalog, a consumer-friendly app store experience. The enhanced catalog provides enriched profiles and categories for service items, bundles, and promotional banners to help self-service users learn more about the services in your organization. For example, you might have a service called "User Account Management" for requesting new accounts or password changes, as shown in the following image:
To set up the enhanced catalog in your organization, catalog administrators must have a license to use the BMC Digital Workplace Catalog application.
Entitle users to be able to request services
Service catalog administrators, asset managers, and supplier administrators create virtual marketplaces to entitle published services, bundles, and banners to end users individually, and in groups.
The following illustration shows the Entitlements page where you create and manage virtual marketplaces:
Promote services by using banner displays
BMC Digital Workplace Catalog administrators can create promotional banners that are displayed for end users in BMC Digital Workplace. They can upload banner images of different sizes to be displayed on desktop and mobile devices.
The following illustration shows an example of a promotional banner shown in BMC Digital Workplace:
Through the intuitive banner configuration page, a BMC Digital Workplace Catalog administrator can perform the following actions:
- Define when to show or hide banners, based on the device operating system
- Configure banners to be shown, based on a date-time schedule
- Specify the action to be done when the user clicks a banner image
- Add localized versions of promotional banners for end users in different locales. For more information, see Localizing-catalog-items.
Generate reports of service utilization
As a service catalog administrator, you can view reports that provide real-time insight into service popularity, accrued costing, and supplier performance metrics set in the service level agreement.
You can also filter service requests as required, and view details of a selected service. You access the available reports from the Reports menu available on the main page header panel of BMC Digital Workplace Catalog.
Additional features for Catalog Administrators
After you have mastered the initial catalog administration tasks, explore the following features:
- Import and manage multi-level categories
- Structure services by using catalog profile templates
- Combine multiple services into bundles
- Set service price, cost adjustments, and allow users to order multiples
- Maintain multiple service versions and revisions
- Assign the service catalog administrator role to team members by setting User Roles.