Record Producer or Catalog Item?

[postwick]

In trying to design our Service Catalog, I am a little unsure of the best approach for some things and I would appreciate knowing how others use it.

Here are a few things that I'm trying to decide between creating as a Record Producer or a Catalog Item.   Which way would you go and why?

Request International Roaming (when users travel out of the country, they request int'l roaming be added to their cell phone line)

Reserve teleconference room

New report in XYZ system

Access to a web site (i.e. unblock in firewall)

What are the pros/cons of using Record Producers vs Catalog Items for these kind of things?

[Michael Ritchie]

Paul, you don't have to use the cart with catalog items.   There are several hidden attributes of a catalog item that you can expose and set to alter the behavior and one of them is "no cart" and by checking this the Add to Cart doesn't appear when ordering this item.   The user simply gets Order Now.

Most customers don't use/assign the parent request and all the work is done at the Request Item or task level.   So while the request is automatically created, you can just ignore it and set your queues up for your fulfillers to just see the request items.   Once all the request items are closed, the parent request is automatically closed.

I agree with Molly and believe catalog items are your best solution here and record producers are mainly used to "produce records" in other tables outside the service catalog.

[Alan So4]

You chose Record Producers.  Does it mean that you also have custom tables to store the requests?

[joelo]

Great comment Molly, very helpful!

[Swapnil Soni1]

Hi postwick,

1. Catalog Item will end up in opening a request and request item and attaches a workflow and catalog task, approvals Whereas a Record producer simply inserts a record in the selected table.

2. With catalog item, You can add multiple items to cart and generate requests and multiple RITM's. whereas a record producer, it only creates a single record on the target table

3. Primarily, the difference is which type of record is created upon submission. I would use a catalog item when you want to generate a request, complete with workflow, approvals, tasks, etc, and a record producer when you want to gather some information using a form (variables) but create some other type of record (incident, change, enhancement, etc.) as a result.

4. A record producer vs a catalog item will appear nearly the same for your end-users, so I'd say it's mostly a process decision in terms of how you'd like to handle them once they're submitted.

5. Record Producer gives a non-ITIL user the ability to create things like an Incident, Change, basically anything but a Request from a custom front end you deliver via the Service Catalog/Portal.

Please mark as Correct Answer and Helpful, if applicable.
Thank You!

Swapnil Soni