Excellent points, Peter. Given that this data should be pretty standardized, maybe we could leverage ARS community power to fix this: What about publishing the Product Catalog on a wiki or similar platform where we could all collaborate on it?
Kelly Logan, Sr. Systems Administrator (Remedy), GMS ProQuest | 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346 | Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA | 734.997.4777 kelly.lo...@proquest.com www.proquest.com ProQuest...Start here. 2010 InformationWeek 500 Top Innovator Please consider the environment before printing this email. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender, and delete the message from your computer. -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Peter Romain Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 7:09 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: New Product Catalog Data Import - Disappointed! Hi, BMC just released new Product Catalog data based on ADDM discovery data. I was hoping to use this data immediately as we need to reconcile ADDM data with other data sources (HP uCMDB, CiscoWorks and manual audit data). I loaded the data only to find that it looks amateurish. Specifically: Data has the first character as upper case and the rest as lower. This means that we see companies like Bmc, Ibm, Hp, etc. The product name data is also the same. For reports this won't look good. Then there are exceptions and possible duplicates such as the inclusion of both 'Network associates' and 'Networks Associates' (note the capital 'A'). Although open to debate the customer here thinks the normalisation aliases are the wrong way around for companies like BMC (BMC Software converts to BMC), HP (Hewlett-Packard converts to Hp), etc. The Tier 1-3 values are all the same. A suggestion of possible values would have been good. The data only includes Product class data. The opportunity to include other classes has been missed (but I hope will come later). The customer here has decided to analyse ADDM data themselves and create Product Catalog, Manufacturers and NE aliases. The BMC data as it stands is as much help as the old DSL data was (did anyone really use this?). Maybe I was expecting too much! Anyone else looked at this? Cheers Peter _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
