ESC & Catalog Builder - How does it work together?

[SN_Marcel Horn]

Hi,

may I kindly ask you how ESC & Catalog Builder work together?

In ESC we have the connected content form which could be e.g. a catalog item.

1. How did you ensure that new catalog items would be shown in the ESC when created with the service builder?

@Pooja Gupta May you give some insight into how it is intended by design?

Thanks in advance

Marcel

[Community Alums]

Hi @SN_Marcel Horn ,

You must associate your catalog items that you want to display in the Employee Center with a taxonomy topic.

By default, Employee Center application ships employee-centric taxonomy and taxonomy topics for IT, HR, Workplace, Legal, and Procurement. You can use the default IT taxonomy to associate your catalog items or you can clone a taxonomy to make your own additions or modifications to the default topic structure that matches your requirements. To clone a taxonomy, refer to the steps mentioned in the Clone taxonomy for employee content topic.

You can associate your existing or new catalog items with a taxonomy topic directly from the Content Taxonomy also. To associate your existing or new catalog items with a taxonomy topic, refer to the steps mentioned in the Associate connected content to a topic topic.

For more information about Unified taxonomy, see Unified taxonomy for Employee Center.

To associate a catalog item from the Service Catalog:

Procedure

1. Navigate to All > Service Catalog > Catalog Definition > Maintain Items.
2. Select the item that you want to associate with a taxonomy topic.
3. In the Assigned Topics related list, click Add.
4. Select the base taxonomy from the Taxonomy list.
5. Select the appropriate topic, for example IT.
6. Select the appropriate child topic from the topic list. For example, to add a laptop, select Hardware, and then Computers.
7. Click OK.

[Fred Jean · Accepted solution]

Hello,

So basically there is actually (currently?) no integration between Catalog Builder and ESC / Taxonomy.

We have this nice tool that we tell our customers they can use to build their catalogs without admins, there they can create catalog items and put them in catalogs and (now a bit uselesss) categories.

But to actually get the item to show in ESC Topics they need to ask an admin to assign it to the topic.

I have seen there is a "Catalog and knowledge categories" related list on the topic form so I expected that there would be some kind of synchronization that would automatically add the items to the topic when that are added to the category, but it's not the case; this items are only added on the topic when you add that category to the topic, no further synchronization after from what I can see.

So whenever a catalog item or knowledge article is created, it needs to be explicitly added both to a category and to a Topic, which is a bit tedious, and this can not be done using catalog builder.

Is that really how this is supposed to work ?

Of course we could probably add customization to do the synchronization, but why isn't this OotB ? (Or may be it is and I missed a configuration to enable it ?)

Are there any plan to change/improve this ?

[Fred Jean]

Note that in Vancouver, we can now select the Topics with Catalog Builder