How to classify software with many versions to create a single CI to reference in incidents/problems

[rhysma]

My organization has asked that the CI dropdown in incidents and other tasks display a single entry for each desktop application we use, in addition to other CIs. I've got filtering the dictionary reference handled, but I am wondering how and what sort of CI should I be creating or setting up a process to create to serve as a parent or umbrella for the multiple versions that appear in the software table?

For example, what we have in the software table for Adobe Reader is:

Adobe Acrobat Reader 23.8.20421
Adobe Acrobat Reader 23.8.20470
Adobe Acrobat Reader 23.6.20380

Which we want to keep, but we want to have a single "Adobe Acrobat Reader" to select as the CI in incidents. 

The onboarding partner during our initial setup loaded a list of CIs into the Application table (which I've seen cautioned against repeatedly). Following the example above, there is an Adobe Acrobat Reader entry in the Application table that was manually put there by the onboarding partner and a dictionary override was set incidents and problems to only show Application classed CIs until we got our CMDB going.

 I'd like to correct this early before we start populating the CMDB in production. Please Advise.

[sondrefaane]

Did you find a solution? 🙂

[rhysma]

Yes. We chose to define the key applications our users need to complete their work as Business Applications, though I believe Application Service might have been a better category.  Ultimately came down to governance finding that Business Application made more intuitive sense to our Service Desk.  We did not go with Business Service as previously suggest, because on a closer look that seems to be a broader category, like Adobe Acrobat, Foxit Phantom, Etc. might all fall under a Business Service or Service Offering of PDF Editors. 

Additionally, it might be helpful to know we filtered our CI Field in all Task forms to only show CI's marked as a principal class and have only marked classes we want Service Desk using so that it does not show all the software instance CIs mentioned in my original post. If they type Adobe, their only options are the Adobe applications we've defined as Business Applications.