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?

[mollyclark7]

Hi Paul,

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 a 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.

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.

[postwick]

All of the above will be requests.   From what I have learned so far, the primary difference is that Catalog Items have the shopping cart functionality (and price info) whereas Record Producers do not. Is that a correct assessment?

I'm thinking that for the above requests I should use Record Producers, since my primary goal is to simply prepopulate most of the information in the request while providing a few basic variables such as dates for roaming or room reservation, details of the requested report, etc.   Common fields like category/subcategory, short description, impact/urgency/priority, assignment group etc will all be predefined for each type of request.

[mollyclark7]

Hi Paul,

Yes, the submission process for catalog items vs   record producers is slightly different, but if you're aiming to create requests on the back end, I'd recommend creating them as catalog items. As a general best practice, ServiceNow doesn't recommend using Record Producers to generate requested items, see here: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Record_Producer

Catalog Items are designed to generate requests, Record Producers are essentially intended for all other tasks. You have the option to use price for Catalog Items but don't need to/can set it to zero.

[postwick]

OK so I tried a catalog item for "unblock web site" and I don't like the way that works.   The shopping cart functionality is extraneous and I think would be confusing to a user.   The RITM record is additional clutter for no reason, and leaves the request itself without the information the engineer needs to complete it. Having to drill down into the RITM record to see which web site they want unblocked is unnecessary extra clicks.

Also, since I'm on Express, there is no way to map the variables to request fields.   They go in as variables in the RITM record.

Record Producers it is!   🙂