Software catalog overview
These concepts provide information to help you perform the software catalog tasks.
- Knowledge base
The knowledge base is a collection of information about software products, their components, the dependencies between them, and the means to discover them. - Software catalog
A software catalog is a document used to store knowledge base data and share it between different applications or between different instances of the knowledge base. A software catalog can be imported into Control Desk, where it is saved in the Maximo® database. The software catalog records are then viewed and managed from the Software Catalog application. - Software hierarchy
A software hierarchy is the combination of product, version, and release (or feature) that represents an item of software in a database or knowledge base. The product is the root of the hierarchy. Two software types, distributed and mainframe, determine the kind of relationships that are possible in the software hierarchy. For example, IBM® DB2® is distributed software with a product, version, and release hierarchy. IBM AIX® is mainframe software with a product, version, and feature hierarchy. - Authorized items and linking
An authorized item is an item master record, with a status of Active, in the Item Master application. When a software catalog record is displayed on the Software tab of the Software Catalog application, you can link the record to an authorized item in order to assist with licensing any future procurements of that item. - Conversion variants
A conversion variant is a software catalog record designated as an alias of the currently displayed record on the Software tab of the Software Catalog application. - Software Catalog and customer data
Customer data is provided in software catalog records for use by service providers.
Parent topic: Using the Software Catalog application