1 Getting Started with Solution Designer

Oracle® Communications Service Catalog and Design provides a unified environment for designing, testing, and deploying integrated multi-application OSS solutions. Service Catalog and Design offers a visually intuitive and easy-to-use interface, enabling business users to configure services through simple drag-and-drop functionality. Its user-friendly design and streamlined, guided workflows simplify the entire service lifecycle from initial creation to ongoing management. It also streamlines the management and maintenance of products, services, and networks by centralizing product, service, resource, and network specifications and configurations. Service Catalog and Design consists of two main components:

  • Solution Designer

  • Design Studio

Solution Designer

Solution Designer allows you to model products, services, resources, and the interfaces between them that comprise a communications service and network solution. It enables you to quickly create and use solutions by providing a consistent design experience. Solution Designer supports the definition of TM Forum (TMF)-aligned PSR (Product-Service-Resource) models for both customer and network services.

Solution Designer offers a journey- and persona-based, design-time user experience. The user interface is designed for improved efficiency and delivers a next-generation user experience. It brings state-of-the-art, consumer-grade usability across devices to sophisticated enterprise scenarios.

Service providers can leverage pre-defined components, specifications, and service templates in the catalog to rapidly assemble and deploy new services. Solution Designer enables product specialists, service specialists, and network specialists to create and manage PSR models, including product fulfillment models, service models, and technology models. You can also create and manage specifications, commercial parameters, data elements, design parameters, characteristics, mapping parameters, design policies, and delivery policies to define an end-to-end service solution. No specific technical expertise is required to use Solution Designer.

A PSR model is an information model structured according to TMF principles, and it:

  • Shows the relationship of product specifications to customer-facing service specifications.
  • Depicts customer-facing service (CFS) specifications as hierarchical assemblies of resource-facing service (RFS) specifications, resource specifications, and location specifications.
  • Defines the content for aligning architectural interfaces, such as design actions on CFSs. By establishing a common definition at these interfaces, Solution Designer enforces consistency among producers, consumers, and intermediate agents, including upstream order definitions and downstream implementations.

The purpose of the model is to visualize an end-to-end solution, gain a high-level understanding, and assess changes easily. In Solution Designer, the model displays information received from upstream systems, details how it transforms into the configurations needed for network solutions, shows the related mappings between upstream systems and characteristics, and highlights the relevant design, assign, and delivery policies.

You can also use Solution Designer to maintain and evolve solutions over time. For example, you can quickly modify your solution in response to ongoing customer feedback, technological changes, or market analysis. Solution Designer enables you to manage solutions at all levels of maturity and throughout their lifecycle. As requirements change and your communications services evolve, Solution Designer supports ongoing solution development.

Design Studio

Design Studio is an integrated tool based on the Eclipse IDE. It enables designers and developers to use fully featured Java IDE capabilities to further enhance, extend, or integrate solution business logic. This design-time environment allows you to build and configure Oracle service fulfillment, network management, and resource management solutions. For more information on Design Studio and its capabilities, see Concepts guide.

Planning a PSR Model

Before designing your PSR model, consider the following questions:

  • Which products and related services offered to customers are you modeling?

  • What are the orchestration fulfillment systems, fulfillment patterns, and routing rules involved?

  • Which entities need to be configured in the network, and which types of applications are responsible for updating these entities?

  • Which other services and resources are needed to realize the customer-facing services? What is the relationship between them?

  • What underlying data do you need to define entities—data significant to the actual implementation of the service? For example, a Mobile Service needs an MSISDN.

About Solution Designer Applications

Solution Designer includes the following applications, accessible using the menu options on the landing page:

Table 1-1 Solution Designer Applications

Application Description

Common Elements

Create and edit data elements, converters, and sequence identifiers.

Domains

Create and manage domains to organize specifications in meaningful groups or realize the PSR model.

Fulfillment

Import capabilities cartridges and view fulfillment patterns, functions, and systems.

Infrastructure Specifications

Create and manage infrastructure specifications such as Location, Party, Role, and Inventory Group.

PSR Models

Create and manage PSR models, including service models, technology models, and product fulfillment models. Here, you design your product, service, and network models with their commercial parameters, design parameters, characteristics, design policies, and delivery policies.

Product Specifications

Create and manage product specifications.

Publishing Center

Create initiatives and manage initiative life cycles. Anything you create and work on in Solution Designer is part of an initiative. Manage workspaces, and add lifecycle stages dynamically.

Resource Specifications

Create and manage resource specifications such as Logical Devices, Flow Identifiers, Device Interfaces, and so on.

Service Specifications

Create and manage service specifications such as CFSs and RFSs.
To navigate between these applications, click Ask Oracle at the bottom right on the landing page.

Note:

After navigating to an application from the landing page and reloading it, the Close Ask Oracle button may not appear the first time you return to the landing page using the Ask Oracle icon. Click on the desired application again to return to it. After the initial interaction, the Close Ask Oracle button displays correctly for subsequent navigation from the landing page.

About Solution Designer User Roles

When you log in to Solution Designer, you use a username and password. Your username is associated with specific roles and privileges, which determine which applications you can access based on your job responsibilities. The user interface is controlled using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and users are assigned appropriate roles according to their needs. All role types are independent; for example, a user could have access to Initiative entities in Solution Designer but may not have access to the Initiative application interface.

See "About Authentication" in Solution Designer Installation Guide for more information about the roles supported by Solution Designer and how to assign roles to the users based on business needs.

Accessing Solution Designer Application

Solution Designer is a web-based application accessible in a browser. For browser and version compatibility, see Service Catalog and Design Compatibility Matrix.

To access Solution Designer, you need a user name and a password provided by a Service Catalog and Design system administrator. See "About Authentication" in Solution Designer Installation Guide for more information about setting up users and groups.

To open the Solution Designer application, log in with your username and password using the following URL:
http://hostname:port/apps/scd/
The variables in the example have the following values:

  • hostname is the Solution Designer host name.

  • port is the port number where Solution Designer is installed.

About Solution Designer Landing Page

The Solution Designer application's landing page lists menu options for individual applications. Click any of these applications to get started. On the top right corner of the landing page, you will find a User Menu drop-down list with several options. You can use these options to:

  • Open the Solution Designer User's Guide using Help.

  • View the version information for Service Catalog and Design using About.

  • Log out of Solution Designer using Sign Out (this will log you out and return you to the login page).

About Searching

Solution Designer uses a smart filter for searching. You can use the Search box throughout Solution Designer to find items. When you click the Search box, suggested search results appear automatically.

To refine your results, type in the box to filter the list. Click any entity to open its detail page. When you return to the search page, your criteria are retained and you can view results based on your earlier filter. When you navigate to any other application or log out of Solution Designer, you can specify a new search criterion.

About Naming Rules

In Solution Designer, entity IDs are automatically generated based on the entity name you enter, and can be modified as needed. To avoid errors when generating cartridges, follow these guidelines for entity IDs:

  • You can use uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers.

  • The first character must be a letter.

  • Underscores are allowed within the ID.

  • Do not use hyphens or periods within the ID.

About Cloning Entities

Solution Designer allows you to clone an existing entity and update its details as necessary. Cloning copies the entity along with its configuration, design parameters, characteristics, and general information. Parameter mappings, design policies, and delivery policies are not copied. The cloned entity is named using the original name with "- Copy" appended and can be renamed as needed. The copy is created within the same initiative.

For example, if Mobile CFS is in Definition status within an initiative called Mobile Service, cloning Mobile CFS creates Mobile CFS - Copy under the Mobile initiative. You can update the general information, domain, configuration, design parameters, characteristics, parameter mappings, design policies, and delivery policies for the copy

About Revising Entities

In Solution Designer, a service or network specialist may revise an entity in the Released status. When you revise an entity, you create a new revision that is attached to an initiative in the Definition status. The original entity definition, attached to an initiative in the Released status, does not change. You can update the revised entity's configuration, design parameters, characteristics, parameter mappings, design policies, delivery policies, and general information. If you delete a revised specification, only the current revision is deleted, and the specification reverts to the previously released version.

Using Product Accessibility Features

You can use these accessibility features with Oracle Communications Service Catalog and Design:

  • Keyboard shortcuts available in your operating system and browser.

  • Accessibility tools provided by screen readers and your browser.