Service Catalogs are developed to describe and provide services for customers. When discussing Service Catalogs, the term "customer" does not mean a traditional BMC FootPrints Service Core customer, i.e., "someone who submits requests to a BMC FootPrints Service Core agent", but rather "any user of services". Therefore, in the context of Service Catalog, a customer can be an agent, administrator, or traditional BMC FootPrints Service Core customer.
The basic process for developing a Service Catalog is:
Determine the service categories, services (or "service items"), and service attributes to be included in your Service Catalog. This step takes place between the Service Catalog administrator and personnel within the organizations or departments to be included in the Service Catalog. It is a planning step and not performed within BMC FootPrints Service Core itself. The information developed from planning will be used to implement the Service Catalog. You may want to plan the information used for the other steps in the process listed below at this point as well.
Enable the Service Catalog. The Service Catalog must be enabled for a workspace in order for it to function.
Create Service Catalog categories. Categories allow you to create a hierarchy, with sub-categories to as many levels as you wish to develop. When others explore the Service Catalog, they will drill down into the service categories until they find the services they wish to view.
Create the attributes of the services. Attributes contain details about the service. For example, let us say you have an IT service providing new desktop computers. One of the service items may be the desktop computer itself. The attributes could be manufacturer, model, amount of RAM, size of hard drive, etc. Attributes could also include images. You might, for a desktop computer, include a picture of the computer itself.
Create Service Request Templates. When agents, customers, administrators, etc., request a service using the Service Catalog, an Issue is created using the data in the Service Request Template. Think of it as a Quick Issue template for services. Requests could be escalated after they are submitted like any other Issue or Request.
Select and list your Hot List services. A list of services is displayed to customers when they access the Services Catalog. These could be any services you want to list for any reason. The list provides a quick means of accessing the details of the service item and entering a request for the service without having to drill down through the various service categories. The list might contain the most popular services of a particular organization or it might contain new services with which few people are familiar or it might be services that are under-utilized and which you want to highlight.
Define user roles for Service Catalog. User roles determine which service categories can be seen by customers and, therefore, which services can be requested. The CMDB user roles function is used to define user roles for Service Catalog as well.