Guidelines for customizing foundation
The BMC Helix ITSM foundation contains all of the common data structures that are used across the BMC Helix ITSM applications, such as operational and product categorization, company and people information, and assignments.
Operational categorization and product categorization
Operational categorization is a structure that is leveraged by the BMC Helix ITSM applications to define what happens in a record. Product categorization is a structure that is leveraged by BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix CMDB to categorize the configuration items (CIs). Both of these structures are used extensively within BMC Helix ITSM to perform a number of functions such as:
- Assignment routing
- Approval routing
- Incident matching lookups
- Reports and queries
- Software license management
- Change process management
- Relationship lookups
Any changes that are made to these structures have an adverse effect across all BMC Helix ITSM applications and BMC Helix CMDB, so we do not recommend changing these structures. Because these structures work with each other to help drive the processes, designing both operational and product categorizations appropriately provides the required functionality. Effective categorizations are provided out of the box.
Company information
The company structure determines how multitenancy is used within the applications. Do not change the workflow around how multitenancy is implemented in the applications because it would have an adverse effect across all applications.
People information
The People form is a key structure for providing information about other structures within the application. The following functions are driven by the People form:
- Application permissions
- Authentication
- Notification subscriptions
- Support group relationships
You can can add new fields and buttons to the People form; however, the people form also has a built-in model for adding additional variables data that enables you to add name or value part data sets that will be related to the people record.
- If you need the information to be visible on the record, you can add additional variable data.
- If you need to pull data into other forms, add the new field directly to the form. This approach provides a better performance.
Assignment routing
The assignment routing forms provide the following functions:
- Select a support group upon submitting a record
- Provide data to the Assignment Engine that assigns an individual to the record that uses assignment rules
This functionality is integrated across BMC Helix ITSM. The typical customization is to add a field to use the mappings for an application to pick a support group. To add this type of functionality, you must:
- Add the appropriate data to your main form (for example, HPD:Help Desk).
- Add the appropriate data to the Assignment Mapping form.
- Extend the support group lookup workflow and menus to make use of this additional field in the qualifications.
Approval routing
The approval routing functionality is leveraged by BMC Service Request Management, BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management, and BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management to assign the appropriate approvers to the record. The following components are leveraged by approvals:
- Approval process lookups
Mappings for level or management of approval chains
- Approval rules in the Approval Server
In addition, BMC Service Request Management enables to you build custom approval chains. This functionality is data driven and enables you to take advantage of any fields on the form to link an approval process to a request.
You can add a new fields to a mapping for selecting an approval process or you can add an additional field to look up individual approvers, but make these changes with care.
To extend the process selection process in BMC Service Request Management, use the approval chain functionality, which is data driven and automatically generates the appropriate workflow to link the approval process based on the required data. For more information, see Configuring approval chains.
For BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management and BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, you must make some changes to the workflow and forms. You must add your new fields to the Approval Process Form and then you will need to change the approval process workflow to look up the process based on that data.
To add a new field for individual approvers lookup:
- Add the field to the approval mapping form.
- Pull the field into the appropriate join forms.
- Update the appropriate approval rules in the Approval Server.