BMC Helix ITSM Customization policy

You can customize BMC Helix services to suit your needs. BMC recommends that you review best practices recommendations for your applications before designing customizations to ensure the best experience for supportability and service updates.

Important

Before you consider making customizations, ensure that you are making maximum use of the configuration capabilities already provided by the application.

Differences between customization, configuration, and changes

For information about how BMC defines customization, configuration, and change, see BMC Helix ITSM customizations, configurations, and changes.

Your customization responsibilities

Any customization that you create in an application is your responsibility to maintain going forward.

If you engage BMC Global Services to perform any customization work, a warranty for a specific time period is typically offered as a part of the statement of work. The warranty guarantees that the functionality works as documented for a limited time after go-live. The warranty does not cover a situation in which you want to change the agreed-upon behavior of a customization, or after the warranty term expires. If a change is required, a new estimation for mitigation work (via a Contract Change Order) will be provided to you and you can choose whether to proceed.

If you engage with a third party, such as a BMC partner, or use internal resources to customize the solution, any defects or functionality issues subsequently discovered are your responsibility to resolve. BMC SaaS Operations does not provide a warranty for customizations performed by third parties. You may choose to execute an agreement with BMC Global Services or a partner to provide ongoing support for customizations on your behalf.

Service updates and customizations

Customizations in a production instance are preserved during the service update process. Even though a customization is preserved, it might require modification based on changes to the out-of-the-box functionality. As part of the user acceptance testing (UAT) process, you should focus on the behavior of the customizations and integrations to understand the impact of the service update. You should use the test cases that were created as part of the initial onboarding process to retest customizations during the UAT phase. You are responsible for implementing any modifications to customizations if they are required during the service update process. In some cases, you might choose to turn off the customization because new out-of-the-box functionality meets your requirements.

Supporting customizations

If a support ticket is created for an issue caused by a customization, the BMC Support team will provide general information about the customization policy and out-of-the-box functionality, but the investigation and resolution of a defect in a customization is solely your responsibility.

Customization process

All customizations must be designed and implemented in the development / tailoring environment. No customization can be created directly in the QA or production environments.

Additional design guidelines are as follows:

Customizations or integrations may not involve the installation of a third-party application in the cloud.
Make sure that the customization is not using any Run process commands to execute non-BMC created executable, batch, or Java ARchive (JAR) files.
No direct-write connection to the database is allowed. Read-only access is permitted via a JDBC connection only.
No direct SQL statements are allowed in a custom or overlay type workflow object.
Web services are the preferred method for the integration of third-party applications; however, other integration methods are supported. See Integrations for a complete list of approved integration methods.
Customizations should not involve any changes to the standard Helix service image or infrastructure configuration, for example, a different Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) version other than BMC's standard version is not allowed.

You may perform UAT on the customization after it has been promoted to the QA environment. If there are issues with the customization, you should resolve the issues in the development environment and repeat the promotion request process.

Customizing BMC Helix ITSM

When customizing the BMC Helix ITSM applications, it is recommended that you first review the following best practice guidelines:

AR System Development guidelines	BMC Helix ITSM Development guidelines
Setting up and going live Customizing applications using overlays and custom objects Developing applications by using BMC Helix Innovation Studio Developing an API program Accessing and navigating Developer Studio	Setting up and going live Customization designs Customizing BMC Helix ITSM Integrating third-party applications with BMC Helix ITSM by using the platform REST API Integrating third-party applications with BMC Helix ITSM by using the simplified REST API

BMC supports the use of Java filters and AR Server Database Connectivity (ARDBC) plug-ins under certain conditions. See Customizations as part of integrations for a detailed summary of what types of customizations are allowed in BMC's cloud, and how to get approval to implement them. Additionally, BMC-supported extensions, for example, BMC Service Resolution (BSR), are allowed. See BMC Helix ITSM optional application component activation for other options.

To request a review of your customization, see BMC Helix ITSM customization guidelines and promotion process.