Some of your observations about Product Catalog data are true. When we analyzed the issue retrospectively, QA spent most energy to verify the update gets installed successfully in customer environments and there was less focus on verifying the quality of the content. Effective measures are now in place to ensure quality of data being shipped.
Based on the feedback we received from the field, BMC has now withdrawn the data update and is in process of making corrections to it. Availability of corrected data would be announced separately. I have added comments below to give more clarity on the data update. 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. >>>>>> Agree. We are in process of correcting it. Then there are exceptions and possible duplicates such as the inclusion of both 'Network associates' and 'Networks Associates' (note the capital 'A'). >>>>>> Agree. This should have been captured as alias. 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. >>>>>> As rightly pointed out, this could be debatable what is manufacturer name and what should be alias for manufacturer. As a thumb rule, we will refer manufacturer name with commonly used name like HP for Hewlett-Packard. But again, BMC could have been better captured as BMC Software. The Tier 1-3 values are all the same. A suggestion of possible values would have been good. >>>>>> This is under way. We have taken ITSM best practices to add categorization to each product. v2 and onwards, all the data updates will have this information for all the products. The data only includes Product class data. The opportunity to include other classes has been missed (but I hope will come later). For the short/medium term (next 12-24 months), we will focus on Software titles only. We dont plan to add any Hardware/Networking product details in data updates any soon. >>>>>> In addition, we are also trying to simplify the install process for this PC data updates. Currently it involves lot of manual steps. Rahul Vedak, Manager of Product Management, Atrium CMDB, BMC Software, Inc. The opinions, statements, and/or suggested courses of action expressed in this E-mail do not necessarily reflect those of BMC Software, Inc. My voluntary participation in this forum is not intended to convey a role as a spokesperson, liaison or public relations representative for BMC Software, Inc. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
