Understanding Configurable Categorization and the Categorization Process
With categorization, you associate partner offerings to catalog offerings, and group them into enterprise catalog categories. Configurable categorization improves the probability of automatically matching a partner's offering to an enterprise offering, and also the probability of automatically matching a partner's category to an enterprise category.
With configurable categorization, you can choose the fields used for matching partner offerings to catalog offerings, and also create rules based on those fields. Each rule can contain multiple conditions and can be applied to several partner catalogs across the same catalog type. It can also be specific to one partner catalog.
Category substitutions automatically match partner categories with enterprise categories, based on user-defined substitute categories. For example, the enterprise category Notebook Computers always matches the partner category Laptops. This feature can be used when you know that partners suggest certain categories and you want them matched with specific enterprise categories.
When reviewing categorization results, you can:
Manually associate partner offerings to catalog offerings.
Propose new catalog offerings when no association exists.
Update partner offering information.
Manually associate proposed new catalog offerings to catalog categories.
Propose new categories when there is no match with existing catalog categories.
Note: The above activities, with the exception of creating rules and defining substitutions, can be performed by partners if they have been granted privileges.
After the categorization review process is complete, the offering assignments are ready to be approved by the enterprise catalog manager, and the partner catalog can be staged for inclusion in the next production version of the enterprise catalog.