When you publish an item, it is available in the catalog for ordering.

Before you begin

Role required: admin

About this task

When you create an item, it is in a Draft state. You can review the item, make changes, and refine the layout as many times as necessary to get the details exactly right.

When the item is ready, a category manager or catalog editor can publish it, making it available as a catalog item in the service catalog.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Item Designer > Administration > All Items.
  2. Open the item record.
  3. Click Publish.
    The item is now a live catalog item, available for ordering.
  4. To view a list of published catalog items, navigate to Item Designer > Published Items.

    It is best not to edit an item record from the Published Items module. Doing so directly accesses that catalog item using standard service catalog functions, not the catalog item designer, losing the benefits of the controlled publishing environment.

    For example, if you copy an item, the copied catalog item is not listed in the Published Items module. To access this copy, navigate to Service Catalog > Catalog Definition > Maintain Items and locate the item named Copy of [item name]. The copied item is an active catalog item. Consider deactivating it by clearing the Active check box until your changes are complete.

Republish an item

Each time you make changes to an item, you must republish it in order for the changes to reflect in the item catalog.

Before you begin

Role required: admin

About this task

When you edit an item, the item state returns to Draft. The live catalog item remains available to order, but does not have the changes you made. This process enables you to make changes to the item in a staging area, then apply those changes to the live catalog item after review.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Item Designer > Administration > All Items.
  2. Open and edit the item record.
  3. Click Publish.

Unpublish an item

When you unpublish an item, it is removed from the service catalog.

Before you begin

Role required: admin

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Item Designer > Administration > All Items.
  2. Open the item record and select Unpublish.
    The item is then inactive within the service catalog, but remains available for editing and republishing. This state is useful if you do not want customers to order the catalog item while you are making changes to them.

Expire an item

When you expire an item, it is removed from both the service catalog and the item designer.

Before you begin

Role required: admin

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Item Designer > Administration > All Items.
  2. Open the item record.
  3. Click Expire.
    The item is removed from the list of active items, and cannot be edited or republished.

Item version

The system can create a new version of the item and deactivate the previous version to ensure that items currently being requested are not affected by these changes.

If you alter a question associated with an item, then you can republish the item. For example, if you change the default value of a question associated to an item, a new version of that item is automatically created when the changed item is published.

As a result, you can see multiple records with the same item name in the Catalog Item Table [sc_cat_item] when viewing all items. The published version of the item is the only active one.