How to manage Available For and Available For Subscriber catalog item visibility

[Jan Ujcic1]

Hi everyone,

I am exploring options for navigating the "Available For" and "Available For Subscriber" mechanisms for making a catalog visible for the end-users. We used to manage visibility using User Criteria in the "Available For"/"Not Available For". Recently, we related all our catalog items directly to business service offerings and those are related to the accounts eligible for their use. This caused issues since the whole account shouldn't be able to see the catalog but often only a specific group. If we detach the account from the service we lose that connection to the services/catalog items which is crucial for reporting and making service improvements.

We would like to keep the "Available For" user criteria which is often done on specific group level and we would like to keep the connection of catalog items to services and consequently accounts ("Available For Subscriber"). We cannot use "Not Available For" since if we block access to the whole account the specific group will also lose it since that criteria has priority over "Available For".

The options I explored:

1. Use "Not available for" with some smart logic (failed, it always has priority over the other two options)
2. Search for a global setting to manage the "Available For Subscriber" visibility - I couldn't find it. It would be great if we can select which one takes precedence or even turn it off.
3. Add groups directly on the service - we have too many catalog items and too many exceptions to make that scale. We need a generic solution. The User Criteria in the "Available For" have generic code that correctly matches groups.
4. Looking at the "SC Category Page" widget that controls the item visibility. The visibility is determined by this call sn_sc.CatItem(itemRecord.getUniqueValue()).canView() for which I cannot access the source code. I would prefer avoiding customizing this widget.

Did anyone else encounter similar issues before? If there's no other options I only see the option of customizing the widget or creating a custom construction for relating catalog items-services-accounts but that would be a shame since it means we will not have those connections in the CSDM.

I'd appreciate any comments, thoughts, or ideas. Thanks

[Mark Manders]

You can create scripted user criteria that return true only if the account of the user is related to the service offering the item is related to AND if the user is part of a specific group. 

[Jan Ujcic1]

Thanks Mark. That does seem like good option but it comes with a lot of rework. Do you have any other ideas that could do the trick?