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 products, 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 products, 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 PSR (Product-Service-Resource) 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.

Service providers can leverage the pre-defined components, specifications, and service templates in the catalog to rapidly assemble and deploy new services. Solution Designer enables service specialists and network specialists to create and manage PSR models that include service models and technology models respectively. You can also create and manage the specifications, data elements, design parameters, characteristics, design policies, and delivery policies to define an end-to-end solution for a service. You don't need specific technical expertise to work in Solution Designer. A PSR model is an information model structured according to TMF principles. A PSR model:

  • 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.

The purpose of a model is to visualize an end-to-end solution, to get a high-level understanding of that solution, and to assess changes easily. In Solution Designer, the model shows information received from upstream systems, how it's transformed into the information needed to configure the network for the solution, the related mappings between the upstream system and the characteristics, the corresponding design and assign policies and the delivery policies.

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

You consider the following before you start designing your 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

Solution Designer includes the following applications which you can access and work with by using the menu options on the landing page:

Table 1-1 Solution Designer Applications

Application Description

PSR Models

Create and manage PSR models that include service models and technology models. Here you create a design of your service and network model with its design parameters, characteristics, design policies, and delivery policies.

Administration

Create and edit data elements that you use to specify data that help define services and resources in the PSR model. You can also create and edit converters that you use to convert the unit of measurement and valuemap.

Product Specifications

Create and manage product specifications.

Service Specifications

Create and manage service specifications such as CFSs and RFSs.

Resource Specifications

Create and manage resource specifications such as Logical Devices, Flow Identifiers, Device Interfaces and so on.

Infrastructure Specifications

Create and manage infrastructure specifications such as Location, Party, Role and Inventory Group.

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 required cartridges.

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 the roles and privileges that determine which applications you can use based on your job responsibilities. The user interface access is controlled using Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and the users are assigned appropriate roles based on their needs. All the different types of roles are also independent of each other. A user could have access to Initiative entity in Solution Designer, but may not have access to Initiative application to interact with the entity.

See "About Authentication" in Solution Designer Installation Guide for more information on various roles that are supported by Solution Designer and assign the roles to the users based on business needs.

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 a 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.

To access the Solution Designer application, log in with your user name and password using the following URL:
http://hostname:port/apps/scd/
The variables in the example have the following values:

  • 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:

  • Opening the Solution Designer application's user's guide using Help.

  • Understanding the version of Service Catalog and Design using About.

  • 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. Click any entity to open the specific entity page. When you navigate back to the search page, the specified search criteria is retained and you can see the results based on the original search criteria. When you navigate to any other application or log out of Solution Designer, you can specify a new search criteria.

About Naming Rules

In Solution Designer, the entity ID is automatically generated based on the entity name entered and can be modified as required. To avoid errors when generating cartridges, follow these guidelines for entity IDs:

  • You can use uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers.

  • Use only a letter for the first character.

  • You can have underscores within the ID.

  • Don't use hyphens or periods within the ID.

About Cloning Entities

Solution Designer allows you to clone an existing entity and update the details as necessary. Cloning an entity copies the entity and its details such as the configuration, design parameters, characteristics, and general information. The parameter mapping, design policies, and delivery policies are not copied when cloning an entity. The cloning process creates a new copy of the entity with the same name appended with - Copy and you can update the entity name. The copy is created within the same initiative. For example, in the Mobile Service, the specification Mobile CFS is in Definition status with an initiative Mobile Service. If you clone Mobile CFS, a copy is created with the name Mobile CFS - Copy with the initiative as Mobile. You can update general information, domain, and its details including configuration, design parameters, entity characteristics, parameter mapping, design policies, and delivery policies.

About Revising Entities

In Solution Designer, a service specialist or a network specialist revises an entity in the Released status. When you revise an entity, you create a revision of the entity that you attach to an initiative in Definition status. The original entity definition, which is attached to an initiative in the Released status, does not change. You can update the details of the revised entity such as the configuration, design parameters, entity characteristics, parameter mappings, design policies, delivery policies, and general information. When you delete a revised specification, only the current revision is deleted and the specification is reverted to the previously released version.

Using Product Accessibility Features

You can use these accessibility features with Oracle Communications Service Catalog and Design:

  • Keyboard shortcuts of your operating system and browser.

  • Accessibility tools of screen readers and your browser.