1 Overview
Learn about the integration of Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) with Solution Designer, which is a part of Oracle Communications Service Catalog and Design (SCD) that enables flexibility in the design-time definition of OSM cartridge content. This enables you to use catalog-driven modeling for products, services, bundles, and offerings. This integration allows you to apply dynamic changes to the runtime OSM environment so that new or updated models are immediately enforced. The integration also supports TM Forum (TMF) standard cartridges, aligning with industry standards.
This guide describes the key interactions between OSM and SCD and explains the new, integrated design journey. It also introduces a reference sample that demonstrates common integration scenarios and explains how to use it to address your business requirements. This guide assumes you are familiar with OSM and SCD.
About OSM
Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) is an order processing system that receives orders from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and manages the fulfillment functions required to complete each order. OSM coordinates tasks across multiple external systems, including billing, inventory, and activation applications. OSM manages both automated and manual fulfillment functions, tracking the overall status and managing any problems that might occur during order processing.
OSM can process orders for various types of services or products and allows you to define custom fulfillment processes for each order type. These processes can include functions like shipping, installation, and service activations, depending on business requirements. OSM monitors every step in the order lifecycle and provides web-based clients for tracking and managing orders.
The OSM architecture includes WebLogic Server-hosted server components, web-based clients for order and task management, utilities, and interfaces for external system communication using Java Message Service (JMS) and Oracle Database. OSM stores both processed orders and the metadata required to create and process new orders.
You implement an order fulfillment process by defining business requirements, specifying the systems OSM must interact with, determining required manual or automated tasks, and modeling the order process in Design Studio. As your business needs change, you can update fulfillment processes or introduce new types of orders.
About Solution Designer
Solution Designer is one of the components of SCD. It centralizes the management of product, service, resource, and network specifications, supporting unified service creation and delivery. This centralization streamlines solution creation, accelerates deployment, and reduces the cost of ownership for operators and system integrators.
Solution Designer enables you to define and manage products, services, resources, and their interfaces. Its role-based design supports rapid solution creation and ongoing modification as business needs evolve. As a cloud-native application, Solution Designer runs on a containerized architecture and is accessible across devices. It supports typical configuration activities such as modeling, testing, and deployment throughout the solution lifecycle.
During the design process, specialists create and refine product and service specifications, model network and technology components, and enrich capabilities cartridges with fulfillment models. Administrators manage the publishing and release of the completed solution.
Service Catalog and Design is a cloud native, microservices based application that enables you to manage the following applications in Solution Designer:
- Common Elements: Define attributes and conversion logic for products, services, and resources.
- Domains: Organize specifications by service type or business area.
- Fulfillment: Import and view capabilities cartridges and define fulfillment requirements and systems.
- Infrastructure Specifications: Model infrastructure and resource roles.
- Product Specifications: Define products and commercial characteristics.
- PSR Models: Model relationships between product, service, and resource specifications.
- Publishing Center: Manage initiatives and lifecycle stages of solution development.
- Resource Specifications: Define physical or logical resources such as devices or phone numbers.
- Service Specifications: Specify customer-facing and resource-facing services.
About Capabilities Cartridges
It is often seen that many parts of a cartridge are relatively unchanging, while others change often over the course of the cartridge's life in a production environment. Some examples of the former would be the order template, the orchestration functions, processes and tasks. Some examples of the latter would be product-to-service mappings, product specifications, decomposition rules, granularity rules, and other dynamic orchestration settings. A capabilities cartridge aims to package up only the relatively unchanging parts of a cartridge, and offers these parts as building blocks.
A capabilities cartridge is therefore, a packaging concept. It is not a new cartridge type but instead relates to the way a set of OSM cartridge content is packaged for delivery into the dynamic design process. Business users and technical experts can use the Solution Designer web application, in addition to Design Studio, to help create and refine OSM cartridges. See Compatibility Matrix in OSM Compatibility Matrix for the supported software versions of OSM and SCD.
When cartridge design spans both Design Studio and Solution Designer, the OSM Cartridge Assembler (OCA) microservice merges content and handles deployment to OSM. This process, known as Dynamic Cartridge Assembly, supports distributed cartridge design by integrating contributions from both business-focused and technical users.
- You can use only TMF cartridges to generate a capabilities cartridge .cpar file.
- The cartridge must host a TMF 622 specification; TMF 641 is not yet supported.
- The target Design Studio OSM server version must be 8.0 or later.
- You can deliver only a single capabilities cartridge for dynamic design. However, multiple versions of the cartridge, identified by solution name, are supported.
You must adhere to the guidelines for generating capabilities cartridges. See "Prerequisites" in Design Studio Modeling OSM Orchestration for the guidelines about working with capabilities cartridge.