Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
Entitlements are what allow you to give users/groups access to Services and/or Blueprints as well as determine what actions they can perform with them. Entitlements offer a significant amount of flexibility in how you provide access to services through the catalog, who can access those services, what actions they can perform, and what is any approvals are required.
Entitlements are made up of three components. Services, Catalog Items, and Actions. You can choose to entitle complete Services which encompass all Items within the service or just select catalog Items. You can also determine what actions the users that belong to the entitle can perform against all the catalog items that are a part of the entitlement. Keep this in mind if you want to have catalog items with lesser or more available actions you will need to put them in different entitlements.
Within entitlements you also have the ability to assign approvals to Services, Catalog Items, and actions. Again keep in mind that you may want to have different approval policies for different groups of people for the same catalog items, this would require a different entitlement for each.
Creating Entitlements
- Go to Administration -> Catalog Management -> Entitlements and select the + sign next to Entitlements at the top of the page.
- When the page opens give your entitlement a name, set the status as active, select the business group that it relates to, and assign the AD users/groups that you would like to grant access to the entitlement. Once completed select next.
- Next on the Items & Approvals screen is where we will entitle the services, catalog items, & Actions. If you entitle an entire service you do not need to add the catalog items from the service under catalog items. If you would like to add some of the catalog items form a service, do not entitle the service, but entitle just the catalog items you would like. You will notice that there are a large amount of actions you can choose from and some are specific to certain types of catalog items. You should be aware of the different types of items and provide the appropriate actions for that item.
Once you are finished adding service, catalog items, & actions to your entitlement click add to create your service. Once created the assigned users can go to the catalog and request the items made available.
