Editing Hardware & Software Items

[kevinthury]

We are relatively new to ServiceNow and want to leverage the Service Catalog to order PCs and Software items.   I have activated the many out-of-box items as a way to provide a demo to leadership, but we will want to slightly change some of these.  

Example...We want to include a Software Item for Visio Standard.   My plan was to simply modify the existing Visio Professional item and tailor the Short_Description and Description fields to meet our needs.   I am unable to do so even with the Admin role.  

Attempts at creating a new Software Item require a Model, Product ID, and Category.   I am unsure what to enter for Product ID and Model, but what tripped me up is I was unable to add the category of Software.   No categories are available to select, despite the Visio Professional item having Software as noted in the image below.

I am no stranger to creating Catalog Items (Service Catalog > Catalog Definitions > Maintain Items) and I hoped this would be a similar process.   Can someone provide direction on how I can edit or create a new Software Item?

[larstange]

Hi

The process it as follows

1. You create the software model in the Software Product Catalog. Here you setup all the fields which will form the description of the software displayed to the user later on.
2. You then Publish the model to the service catalog via the publish button. A pop-up will prompt you for the category to place the item in.
3. A catalog item is generated. Some fields will be read-only - you need to modify their content in the product catalog
4. If you need anything to happen when ordering the software item, you know need to related a workflow and maybe also a variable set to prompt for different stuff - consider making a business rule to add this to the catalog item automatically when you are publishing

[kevinthury]

Thanks, Lars!   That pointed me in the right direction and I was able to get this to work following your steps.   However, I'll admit I don't have a full grasp of how/why this works the way it does.   The main burning question I have is:

If a Software Model is needed for the Catalog Item, how can the "Microsoft Visio Professional" item (Image in my initial post) exist without a Model.   If I wanted to, where would I edit that?

[larstange]

Hi

Don't "trust" the demo data. The catalog item you are referring to is situated in the "pc_software_cat_item" table.

This is the table where software catalog items are created, when publishing them from the product catalog - this particular record does not have a corresponding record in the product catalog. So its not representative of real data.

You do not need the product catalog to create catalog items - the purpose of the product catalog is to bind the service catalog and the asset/procurement management process together.

Each model in the product catalog is assigned a "model category". This model category specifices if assets and CIs must be created and the type of asset and CI.

The field "Asset tracking strategy" on each product model, can overwrite the settings of the model cateogry, and determines if an asset is created or if the specific model is tracked as a consumable (then only an amount of assets are tracked).

Here is a high level picture of the data model