Best Practices › Guidelines for Customizing Catalog Content › Catalog Entries › Service Options and Service Option Elements

Service Options and Service Option Elements

A service option is the most basic element that users can request or subscribe to in the catalog. A service option consists of one or more service option elements. The service options in the Best Practice content have the following service option elements. Your modified catalog can have more or fewer service option elements, depending on its design.

Note: If you are using CA Workflow, verify that the first service option element in a service option is a Text type service option element using plain text. Do not use rich text. Otherwise, no restrictions exist on the number, types, or order of the remaining service option elements.

Short Description

Specifies a plain text field (not rich text) that describes the service being requested or subscribed to.

Use this option to describe the service in cases where rich text or HTML is not processed properly. For example, the workflows use this column to title the email.

Long Description

Specifies a rich text field.

This text describes the service in greater detail and can include a hyperlink to an internal web page containing additional information about the service.

Rate

Specifies the cost of the service option.

Best Practices dictate that consumers understand the cost of the service to the corporation, regardless of whether the request is charged back.

Because the cost structure at your location is unique, all service option elements have been set to a one-time charge. Best practices suggest that determining cost and rate structures depends on a number of factors. In some cases, the rate posted in the catalog is only advisory: The rate reminds users that although they are not charged, the service is not free. In other cases, however, the posted rate is linked to a chargeback policy. In these cases, it is designed to recover the cost of the service. CA Service Accounting is designed for automating the process of tracking service costs.

Service Level

Describes the level of service the user can expect. The user can click the "More Information" link to get a description of the basic levels of service that they can subscribe to. The sample information displayed when you click the "More Info" hyperlink is contained in "sladescription.html" located in the %USM_HOME%\filestore\images\offerings directory. You can change this location, as follows: Use the Service Builder to modify each service option element in your catalog to reference a file in another location.

Note: In this implementation of catalog content, the service level agreement service option element is text only. It includes no service level reporting or enforcement using the text service option element.

Special Instructions

Specifies additional instructions for the user.

Many services require users to specify additional detail information. An example is a "backup production server" service on which you must back up files and specify the backup interval. The instructions tell users to place this information in the notes associated with a request.

Note: You can use the Form service option element type to present custom forms to gather additional information from the requester.