Setting up Foundation data about the people in your company
Foundation data is information about people in a company, their attributes, categories, organizations, and locations. It contains the common data elements that are required for the data structure used by BMC Helix Business Workflows.
Foundation data consists of the following elements:
- Organization—Represents a group of people with a particular purpose.
- Person—Represents both users and non-users of an application.
- Location—Represents a physical place or site as well as a collection of sites or geographical regions.
- Categorization—Represents a means of classifying people or objects who have shared characteristics.
- Geography—Represents the geographic location of an organization or person by identifying the country, state, region, and city. This information is used by the Locations data element to represent the physical location of an organization or person.
Learn about Foundation data elements in Foundation data model.
BMC Helix Business Workflows uses Foundation data from BMC Helix ITSM after BMC provisions and activates your system. As an administrator, you must create BMC Helix Business Workflows specific Foundation data, such as categories, support groups in BMC Helix ITSM and associate them with domain tags to use them in BMC Helix Business Workflows.
The following figure describes the different actions that you can take to use Foundation data in BMC Helix Business Workflows:
Localized Foundation Data for the fields
Case agents can view the Organization, Person, Location, Categorization, and Geography details, which are a part of the Foundation data associated with a case, task, or knowledge article in the specified locale. Agents can work in their preferred language, which makes it easier to handle cases in countries with multiple language requirements.
The fields display localized data only if localized data is present at the foundation level.
In the activity log's change field details, the fields are displayed in the default locale, regardless of any preferred locale settings.
Before you begin
You must configure the following parameters in the AR System Generic UI form:
- Data_Default_locale—To define the default locale for data.
- Enable_Locale_Data_Translation—To enable localized operational categorization data translation.
For more information, see Setting configuration parameters in BMC Helix ITSM.
To view the fields in the preferred locale
- Log in to BMC Helix Business Workflows as a case agent with your preferred locale.
For more information on setting your preferred locale, see Selecting a preferred language. - Open any record where foundation data is available, and then click Edit.
Fields such as Assignee, Requester name, Category Tier, Organization, Location, and others now appear in the selected locale.
If you do not see the data in the specified locale even after enabling the configuration parameters, make sure that the locale data for the category is loaded. The default locale is displayed if the data is not loaded. For more information, see Loading Foundation data by using Data Management.
The following screenshot shows the fields in the Chinese locale on a case edit screen:
