Best Practice for Publishing Hardware in HAM Pro

[Stuart Detter]

Looking for some advice and/or best practices on publishing hardware to the Service Portal and if needing to keep all instances in sync is necessary. We have turned on the HAM Pro application about 6 months ago and are still working through everything, but would like to go-live within the next 2-3 months.

When creating a new model from the Hardware Model table, we know we can click the related list to "Publish to Hardware Catalog" and have the hardware model available for ordering. This step would be done directly in our live Production instance, not recreated in lower instances, and handled by our Procurement team as new models are available to order. Likewise, we have created multiple catalog items (Service Catalog > Catalog Definitions > Maintain Items) and then migrated the changes through our Dev, Stage and finally Prod instances. All our catalog items displayed in our Service Portal have been, and will continue to be, created by our Admin / Dev team.

My questions is which is the "best" way to publish specific hardware models to the Service Portal for our employees to order: Hardware model table, or create a new catalog item and migrate it through various instances to Production? I appreciate any feedback or guidance provided.

[Ashok Sasidhara · Accepted solution]

Ideally it should be handled as an enhancement irrespective of how you are publishing it. The requirements should be provided along with the business need for introducing these catalog items.  Then it should be developed and tested on non-prod instances and migrated to production. i.e. Depending on the process followed in your organization, there should be something like a change request or a story or a request which serves as a record for future reference about why the catalog item was introduced.

Even if your process is allowing the procurement team to create it on prod for a valid reason, there should be at least some sort of record which indicates why those catalog items were introduced. 

[Ashok Sasidhara · Accepted solution]

Ideally it should be handled as an enhancement irrespective of how you are publishing it. The requirements should be provided along with the business need for introducing these catalog items.  Then it should be developed and tested on non-prod instances and migrated to production. i.e. Depending on the process followed in your organization, there should be something like a change request or a story or a request which serves as a record for future reference about why the catalog item was introduced.

Even if your process is allowing the procurement team to create it on prod for a valid reason, there should be at least some sort of record which indicates why those catalog items were introduced. 

[Stuart Detter · Accepted solution]

Thank you, Ashok. This advice is very helpful and will be put in place as we dive deeper into HAM Pro.