BMC Helix ITSM customization guidelines and promotion process

Customizations within BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Innovation Studio requires customer acceptance of the following criteria:

  • Customer has followed BMC's published best practice design guidelines detailed on this page
  • The customization is saved in Best Practice mode
  • The customization uses field IDs within the customer range
  • The customization contains no unqualified searches

BMC Helix ITSM

  • The customization contains no direct SQL calls
  • Custom database view in Helix is not supported

Best Practice
When you are working on customizations, BMC requests that you follow these guidelines:

  • Carefully consider performance by table chunking (delaying table refresh until it is visible, and reading data from a form once to avoid multiple reads to the same form).
  • Check for missing workflow after a service update and upgrades, because upgrades can delete objects.
  • Reduce the complexity of a customization by reducing code, simplifies reverification after a service update.
  • Consider having fewer languages and fewer custom fields, because additional languages increase the maintenance required.
  • Carefully review the requirement, and find ways of addressing it using combinations of configurations, which reduce the amount of customization and the update risks.

  1. The customer's onboarding team designs and develops the proposed customizations. When creating customizations:

    Customers may...

    Customers may not...

    • Create overlay of forms, fields (including data, table, trim, and buttons), menus, views, active links and guides,
      filters and filter guides, escalations, applications, web services, and packing lists
    • Add new custom forms, fields, and workflows to enable required functionality
    • Hide existing non-mandatory fields
    • Mark an additional fields as required
    • Adjust appearance with skins
    • Adjust screens for branding (or use the standard Lifecycle Service request)

    For more information, see Customizing applications using overlays and custom objects.

    • Save in Base mode
    • Alter core functionality
    • Re-purpose fields even if they appear to be unused
    • Attempt to change a data type for a field
    • Use fields in reserved range
    • Perform direct SQL calls
    • Modify cascading style sheets
    • Leave any unqualified searches, for forms, workflow, table fields
    • Re-design what core application workflow does

     

      

  2. Customers must follow the instructions under the Promoting your Customizations section of the Customization Audit form. All sections prior to the Promoting your Customizations section are optional and BMC highly recommends to use this template as a guide for documenting your customizations. 

  3. When the customer is ready to promote the customization, please submit a Change Request for migration of the customization to the QA and production environments by using Support Central.

    Important

    • We recommend compressing attachments prior to submitting them. BMC will work with you to provide alternative solutions to submit attachments if the attachment size exceeds the file size limitations. 
    • Pre-production customers who are still onboarding and have not yet gone live with their solution will normally create customizations in the development environment and submit a request to migrate the entire system to the QA and production environments. When the onboarding team submits a request for migration of the developed system to QA (executed using database copy), customizations developed in the development environment will be moved to QA for testing. The solution design document must be submitted along with the change request.

 

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