Managing Partner Processes
This chapter provides an overview of Catalog Management and discusses how to:
Manage partner processes.
Create category hierarchies.
Define transformations.
Define categorization.
Create versioning.
Archive and purge.
Manage security.
Define roles.
Managing Partner Processes
Catalog Management enables the organization to share catalog content with partners. Partners can import and manage their own content. Partners can:
Define the catalog source.
Import, transform, and load content into the catalog.
Categorize offering data and review categorization results.
Stage approved catalog offerings.
Manually update their data.
Browse staged and production versions of the enterprise catalog.
See Also
Assigning Partners and Granting Privileges
Creating Category Hierarchies
With Catalog Management, you can either create categories and category hierarchies, use the United Nations Standard Products and Services Classification code (UNSPSC), or use PeopleSoft trees. You can support multiple hierarchies within a catalog in order to syndicate content for customers or partners using their preferred category hierarchy. You can:
Add and maintain categories.
Rearrange the category hierarchy.
Create an unlimited number of category levels.
Import the UNSPSC hierarchy.
Use category hierarchies set up by Tree Manager.
Manage multiple hierarchies within a single catalog.
See Also
Creating Categories and Category Hierarchies
Defining Transformations
Every partner's content is different in format and structure, and every catalog requires its own format and structure based on its type. You can define transformations to translate each partner's catalog content into the appropriate catalog format and structure. To simplify the source-to-target mapping effort, Catalog Management automates most data transformation setup and maintenance. Before defining catalog maps, you can:
Set up target field default values.
Define filtering rules to identify structured content that does not meet standard criteria.
Standardize the domain of attribute values by replacing attribute values with equivalent predefined values.
Perform calculations to derive additional attributes.
Perform string manipulations.
See Also
Understanding the Transformation and Loading Process
Defining Categorization
Organizing offerings into a category hierarchy enables users to quickly search and locate appropriate products and services. With Catalog Management, you can:
Automatically categorize content based on offering names or partner categories.
Assign an offering to one or more categories in a hierarchy.
Match offerings from multiple partners into a common catalog offering, or create a separate catalog offering for each partner and offering combination.
See Also
Creating Versioning
Catalog Management maintains multiple versions of both partner catalogs and enterprise catalogs.
A new version of a partner catalog is created when the process to load partner offerings is run.
Content updates are applied to a staged copy of the unified catalog, and then moved to production, enabling review and verification of the content prior to syndication. When the process to move the catalog to production is run, a new catalog version is created by incrementing the version by one. As a result, changes can be made to the catalog without hindering day-to-day browsing, syndication, and purchasing needs.
Once a version is selected for production, all other versions are stored but not used again. The Remove Unused Versions feature provides a way for the catalog manager to remove these unused partner versions.
Archiving and Purging
Archiving catalog data allows catalog managers to manage the volumes of data maintained by Catalog Management by moving enterprise catalog data, that is no longer required, to history files. Removing this historical data from online tables prevents the database from increasing to an unmanageable size, and improves overall performance. The purge feature deletes previously archived data from the system. Once purged, the data cannot be restored.
Managing Security
With Catalog Management, both you and your partners use the same application for importing and managing structured content. The configurable security model built into Catalog Management enables you to:
Create and manage users and roles using standard PeopleTools user administration.
Assign user privileges to perform catalog administration functions, such as categorizing partner content, syndicating content, and moving a catalog to production.
Defining Roles
There are four significant roles in Catalog Management: the administrator, the taxonomist, the manager within the enterprise, and the catalog partner.
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The enterprise catalog administrator has access to all catalog setup information and the ability to assign themselves as an enterprise catalog manager for all catalogs that he or she creates. This person creates catalogs and grants catalog access. Note. Only enterprise catalog managers can gain access to catalog content. |
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The taxonomist defines categories and category hierarchies. |
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The enterprise catalog manager has access to catalogs to create and maintain data. This person manages data on behalf of a partner or for items provided directly by the enterprise. The catalog manager performs these activities:
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Catalog partners can access only their own catalogs. Access is determined by permissions assigned at the catalog level. The enterprise catalog manager and the catalog partner share the responsibility for catalog content maintenance. The catalog partner performs these activities:
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