Products and the catalog

Before anyone can make a request, two things are set up under Request Management → Settings:

1. A product: what you provide, and its entitlements, the parts a customer gets a number or a choice of.
2. A catalog item: what someone can request, a product with its form. One product usually has a few: one to get it, and one or more to change it.

Both belong to one organization. They need the Request Management settings permission (the Request Manager has it).

An example

You run hosted desks for your accounts. A customer gets a number of staff seats, and picks which plugins are turned on.

What you add	Its settings
Product Hosted desk	Entitlements: Staff seats (a number, 1 to 500) and Plugins (several of Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management). Delivered by people.
Catalog item New hosted desk	Product: Hosted desk. Kind: Get a new one. One extra question: Address for the desk.
Catalog item Add staff seats	Product: Hosted desk. Kind: Change one the account already has.

A contact at Acme requests New hosted desk, answers 10 seats and Incident Management, and sends it. After it is approved and done, Acme has a sold product Hosted desk with those entitlements. Later they request Add staff seats, pick their desk, and the form starts from 10 seats.

Products

Settings → Products lists the products with their entitlements, how they are delivered, how many catalog items use them and how many accounts have them. Add product, or click a product to change it. The editor has a preview beside it: how every request for the product asks its entitlements.

About the product

Setting	What it holds
Name	What staff and requesters see: "Hosted desk", "Support plan".
Description	For your team: what the product is. Requesters see the catalog item's description instead.
Reference for integrations	Made from the name, such as hosted-desk. Fulfilment webhooks and the API know the product by it. Edit sets your own before the product is added (lower case letters, digits and -, unique in the organization). Once the product is added it never changes, so integrations built on it keep working.

Entitlements: what a customer gets

An entitlement is something a customer gets a number or a choice of. Every request for the product asks it, and the account's sold product keeps the answer, so you can always see what each account has. A product without entitlements is simply had or not, like a one-off setup.

Add entitlement adds a row. Each row has:

Setting	What it holds
Label	What it is called on the form and on the account's products: "Staff seats".
Type	Number: a quantity, such as seats or storage in GB. One of: the requester picks one option, such as a plan or a region. Several of: the requester picks any of the options, such as add-ons or modules.
Lowest and Highest	For a number: the limits a request must stay within. Leave one empty for no limit.
Options	For One of and Several of: one row per option. Type an option and press Enter to add the next; rename one in place, move it up or down, or remove it.
Help text	Shown under the input on the request form: "Everyone who works on cases needs a seat."
Required	The request can't be sent without an answer.
Advanced → Key	The entitlement's name for integrations and the API (staff_seats), made from the label. Once the product is saved the key stays when the label changes, because sold products and answers already given use it. Change it only when no integration uses it yet.

The arrows move a row up or down: the form asks the entitlements in this order. A closed row shows a summary, and says what is missing, such as "Needs at least one option", before the product can be saved.

Fulfilment: how it gets delivered

What happens after a request for the product is approved:

• People do it. The people in the catalog item's unit do the work, then mark each item done or failed on the request.
• An integration does it. The desk sends the event requests.item_approved to a webhook. The system behind it does the work and reports back done or failed. See automatic fulfilment to set it up.

Status

Active off: the product can't be requested from any catalog item. Accounts that have it keep it.

A product that a catalog item or an account uses can't be deleted; make it inactive instead.

Catalog items

Settings → Catalog items lists what can be requested, with its product, its kind, the unit that handles it and where it is shown. Add catalog item needs a product first. The editor shows a live preview of the request form as a requester sees it.

What is requested

Setting	What it holds
Name	The title on the catalog and the form, in the requester's words: "New hosted desk", "Add staff seats".
Description	Shown to requesters under the name: what they get and anything to know first.

Product and kind

Setting	What it holds
Product	What the request is for. Its entitlements are asked on the form.
Get a new one	The account gets the product, with the entitlements asked on the form. Example: "New hosted desk".
Change one the account already has	The requester picks one of the account's products of this kind and changes its entitlements. The form starts from what it has now. Example: "Add staff seats".

Both stay once the item is added, because requests made from it depend on them.

Who handles it

The Unit gets the item's requests and their cases. Its people see them, and those with the permissions approve and fulfil them.

Questions on the form

The form asks the product's entitlements by itself, as the product defines them; the editor lists them. Add question adds anything else the team needs to do the work, such as a domain name or what it is for. A question has the same settings as an entitlement, with these types: Short text (one line), Long text (a few sentences) and One of (a list of options). Its key can't be one of the product's entitlement keys.

Where it is shown

Setting	What it holds
Requesters can request it on the portal	On: signed-in contacts whose address belongs to an account can request it. A portal's menus decide where it appears; an admin adds it to one of the portal's menus under Platform → Portals, on the portal's Menus tab. Off: it is staff only, and staff request it for an account.
Sort order	Where catalog items are listed together, lower numbers come first; the same number sorts by name.

Status

Active off: the item can't be requested. Requests already made from it stay.

An item something was requested from can't be deleted; make it inactive instead.

On the portal

A contact must be signed in, and their address linked to an account, to make a request. A change item asks which of the account's products it changes, and starts from what that product has now. After Request, they see "Your request REQ-12 is sent", with a link to the case where you will talk.