Enhanced catalog

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 "Request for More Memory" for requesting to increase the RAM for your laptop, as shown in the following image:

To set up the enhanced catalog in your organization, catalog administrators must have a license to use BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog, which is an enterprise app store solution designed to be the center of your digital workplace. Through a single administration dashboard, IT departments can aggregate, manage, deliver, and track hardware, software, and services from multiple cloud-based and on-premises sources.

Required license

BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced

Related topics

Setting up sections in the Catalog

Creating and managing the service catalog

Enabling and configuring the enhanced catalog for BMC Helix Digital Workplace

Creating promotional banners

Adding and updating bundles

BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog integrates with external fulfillment systems through service connectors to enable communication between the catalog application platform and the different fulfillment systems. (See the following example illustration.)

Important

The service providers shown in the following image are for illustrative purposes and are not built into BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog.

Enriching catalog profiles with images, video, and rich text

Enhance the service catalog experience by creating profiles for service items that include:

Multimedia carousel of videos and images to illustrate the selected service.
Rich text descriptions with business and technical details to help users make decisions when requesting services.
Downloadable files and links to internet and other web resources.
Service ratings and timeline to help users evaluate solutions.

You can enrich catalog profiles in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog, and they are displayed in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace end user console.

Following is an example of a rich catalog profile:

Leveraging rich text formatting

Users can benefit from the powerful text editing panel when they submit comments to service requests.

Important

End users can add comments with the rich text formatting elements only to services created directly in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog.
(Version 22.1.04 and later) In Mozilla Firefox, when adding an image to a comment, end user must select the Upload check box after selecting the image file. If the Upload check box is not selected or is selected before choosing the image file, the upload is unsuccessful.

The following text customization options are available:

Bold, Italic, and Underline fonts
Color selection
Text alignment
Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are added in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace administrator console. For the configuration steps and supported formats, see Defining navigation through links in pages.

Numbered and bulleted lists
Drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste features as well as the image icon to insert up to two images

The maximum size of each embedded image is 5 MB. You can reduce the maximum size by updating the settings in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace administrator console, see Updating the attachment settings for service requests.

One attachment

Comments with rich text formatting added in BMC Helix Digital Workplace are supported and retained by BMC Helix Business Workflows. These comments can be seen in request details in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog and are preserved in email notifications.

However, in BMC Helix ITSM, comments are shown as plain text, and inserted images are shown as attachments.

You can also enable end users to leverage rich text formatting in questionnaires; see Adding questions to a questionnaire.

Highlighting services and other important information with banners

Notify users of important information and draw attention to featured services in your catalog by using promotional banners of different sizes. You create these banners in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog and add them to the catalog display in the BMC Helix Digital Workplace Admin console, and they are displayed in the end user console.

Following is an example of a full-width hero banner displayed in the end user console:

Following is an example of feature banners displayed in the end user console:

Combining related items that are ordered together with bundles

Help users select options for requested items. Service bundles can contain optional items that the user can switch on or off before submitting the request. The catalog manager can switch the status of optional items as on or off when packaging a bundle.

Following is an example of a bundle with optional items:

Enabling users to filter catalog items by categories

Provide filters to make it easier for users to browse the catalog.

Following is an example of a category selection:

Enhancing the search for enhanced catalog items

Make it easier for users to find items in the catalog. Users can search the catalog for words found in the following catalog profile sections:

Service name or title
Service version
Service description
Service tags

Best Practice

We recommend that you develop a consistent tagging scheme for your organization.

Learning more about IT service brokering

Growing enterprises experience challenges to provide access to the services that their teams need to do their work, while enforcing information privacy and security compliance, maintaining system performance, and ensuring license costs are within the allowed budget. Service brokering is a key ingredient for automating users' access to approved services and for reducing the overhead of retaining idle services over time.

If the concept of service brokering is new or unfamiliar to you, read a fresh perspective on enabling the digital workplace. BMC released IT Service Brokering for Dummies (a PDF file that is 1.72 MB) to share:

What IT service brokering is, and why it's needed.
How your business can benefit from IT service brokering.
What to look for in an IT service brokering solution.

The introduction explains:

The proliferation of new technology trends and enterprise users increasingly obtaining IT services from anywhere and everywhere is driving the adoption of an IT–as–a–Service model... the traditional role of internal IT departments has become obsolete and IT organizations that resist these trends will become irrelevant. Enterprise CIOs must recognize and embrace this paradigm shift—IT service brokering is your future!