1 Getting Started with Solution Designer
Oracle Communications Service Catalog and Design provides a unified environment for designing, testing, and deploying integrated multi-application OSS solutions. Service Catalog and Design offers a visually intuitive and easy-to-use design, enabling business users to configure services through simple drag-and-drop functionality. Its user friendly design and streamlined guided workflows simplify the entire service lifecycle, from initial creation to ongoing management. It simplifies the management and maintenance of services and networks by centralizing service, resource, and network specifications and configurations. Service Catalog and Design comprises the following two components:
- Solution Designer
- Design Studio
Solution Designer
Solution Designer enables you to model services and resources, and the interfaces between them that make up a communications service and network solution. It enables you to create and use solutions quickly by providing a consistent design experience. It enables you to define TM Forum (TMF) aligned (product-service-resource) PSR models to define customer and network services.
Solution Designer provides user journey and persona based design-time user experience. The user interface provides improved efficiency and provides next generation user experience. It brings state-of-the-art, consumer grade user experiences across devices to sophisticated enterprise scenarios.
- Shows the relationship of product specifications to customer facing service specifications.
- Shows customer facing service (CFS) specifications as a hierarchical assembly of resource facing service (RFS) specifications, resource specifications, and location specifications.
- Defines the content for aligning architectural interfaces such as design actions on CFSs. By defining a common definition at these interfaces, Solution Designer enforces consistent implementations among the producer, consumer, and intermediate agents such as upstream order definitions and downstream implementations.
You can also use Solution Designer to maintain solutions and to change them over time. For example, you can quickly change your solution based on ongoing responses from customers, changes in technology, and market analysis. You use Solution Designer to configure solutions at all levels of solution maturity, and over the lifetime of a solution. As requirements change, and as your communications services evolve, Solution Designer enables you to evolve your solutions.
Design Studio
Design Studio is an integrated tool based on Eclipse IDE. This enables designers and developers to use the fully-featured Java IDE capabilities to further enhance, extend or integrate the solution business logic. This design-time environment enables you to build and configure Oracle service fulfillment and network and resource management solutions. For more information on Design Studio and its capabilities, see Concepts guide.
Planning a PSR Model
- Which services offered to customers are you modeling?
- Which entities need to be configured in the network, and which types of applications are responsible for updating these entities?
- Which other services and resources are needed to realize the customer facing services? What is the relationship between them?
- What underlying data do you need in order to define entities, data that is significant in the actual implementation of the service? For example, a Mobile Service needs a MSISDN.
About Solution Designer Applications
Table 1-1 Solution Designer Applications
Application | Description |
---|---|
PSR Models | Create and manage PSR models that include service models and technology models, where you create a design of your service and network model with its design parameters, characteristics, design policies, and delivery policies. |
Data Elements | Create and edit data elements that you use to specify data that help define services and resources in the PSR model. |
Specifications | Create and manage specifications such as CFS, RFS, resource, and location. |
Initiatives | Create initiatives and manage initiative life cycles. Anything you create and work on in Solution Designer is part of an initiative. |
Domains | Create and manage domains, to organize specifications in meaningful groups or realize the PSR model. |
Workspaces | Enables Solution Designer to interact with DevOps engine to generate the requested cartridge. |
To navigate between these applications, click Ask Oracle at the bottom right.
About Solution Designer User Roles
When you log in to Solution Designer, you enter a user name and a password. Your user name is associated with roles and privileges that determine which applications you can use based on your job responsibilities. To use the Solution Designer application, users need at least one of these roles:
Role | Description |
---|---|
Service Specialist | Can do anything in Solution Designer, except Initiatives and Workspaces. Users with this role can access Specifications, Domains, Data Elements, and PSR Models. |
Service Catalog Admin | Can do anything in Solution Designer, including the Initiatives and the Workspaces application. Users with this role can access Initiatives, Workspaces, Specifications, Domains, Data Elements, and PSR Models. |
Accessing Solution Designer Application
Solution Designer is a web-based application that you open in a browser. For browser and version compatibility, see Service Catalog and Design Compatibility Matrix.
To access Solution Designer, you need a user name and password provided by a Service Catalog and Design system administrator. See "About Authentication" in Solution Designer Installation Guide for more information about setting up users and groups.
http://hostname:port/apps/scd/
Where
- hostname is the Solution Designer host name.
- port is the port number where Solution Designer is installed.
About Solution Designer Landing Page
The Solution Designer application's landing page lists the menu options for individual applications. Click any of these applications to work with. On the top-right corner of the landing page, you find a User Menu drop-down list with some options. You can use these options for:
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Opening the Solution Designer application's user's guide using Help.
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Understanding the version of Service Catalog and Design using About.
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Logging out of Solution Designer using Sign Out. This action logs you out of the Solution Designer application and displays the login page.
About Searching
Solution Designer uses a smart filter for searching. Throughout Solution Designer, you can use the Search box to find items. When you click the Search box, suggested search results appear.
You can narrow down a collection of items that you're looking for, by typing in the box to filter the list.