Product Administration Guide > Introduction >

How This Guide Is Organized

This guide describes how to create and manage products. The guide deals with two types of products: simple products and customizable products.

Simple products are those that do not have components that can be interactively configured. For example, you sell a model of telephone that has no components that can be configured at the time of quote or purchase. The telephone may have attributes that you can select, such as color. This is a simple product.

A customizable product is one that has configurable components. For example, you sell desktop computers that have several types of monitor and hard drive. Users can select which monitor and which hard drive they want at the time of purchase. Customizable products and their components can also have configurable attributes.

This guide is organized as follows:

• The early chapters provide background information.
• The following chapters give information used to create both simple and customizable products. The chapter on basic product administration describes basic product administration tasks, such as creating a product record or associating literature with a product. This is followed by chapters that describe how to create and manage the product class system. Additional chapters describe features such as product bundles and smart part numbers.
• Following this are chapters that describe how to create customizable products. These chapters make up the bulk of the information in the guide.
• The last chapter is a technical reference and provides information on topics of interest to integrators and developers.