Service Offering Catalog Items - Subscriptions

[Jonathan102]

Hi all,

Can someone please help me understand why and what benefit is offered by creating a catalog item off of a service offering that someone must subscribe to?  I can create a catalog item independent off a service offering and still set all of the same permissions regarding who can access them item.  I can't find anything that explains why creating it off a service offering offers something beneficial.  To me, it would be much more confusing to an end user to need to subscribe to an offering to access a catalog item.  I have looked for helpful info for two days, can't find anything.  All the docs I find just detail that it can be done.

Thanks,

Jonathan 

[SteveMacWWT]

In your use case I don't believe the Subscribe capability is meant for individuals to subscribe to get access to the catalog item. It is meant more in the reverse: you can limit access to those who meet the criteria based on groups, locations etc. 

The question of 'why in Offerings as well as in a Catalog Item' may still seem relevant, but that does not consider the other use case of Subscribed in Offerings - who is impacted when an Offering is part of an Incident, Change, etc.. If that question is not one of your company's use cases for Offerings, then you can ignore. (In a perfect world of time and staffing levels you would do it anyway, but reality is reality, and you may not have the bandwidth to address that right now.)

Steve