Fulfillment Catalog Strategy
You can use TIBCO's best practices to determine how best to utilize TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog in your business environment. This requires a strategy for handling your configuration requirements and decisions when running the TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog in either a live production system or in a deployment environment.
You can configure TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management so that the product model dynamically publishes via messaging from TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management (or potentially another product catalogue system). You can also configure TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management to read the product catalogue from off-line files.
You can make changes to the TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog in a live production system; however, you should be aware of the implications. The following implications show the potential danger of a live TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog instance dynamically publishing the product model to TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management :
- If the catalogue is changed incorrectly, the production system is immediately impacted.
- TIBCO Fulfillment Order Management requires a live instance of TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog.
- New products generally mean new process components and most likely a software release would be required anyway.
TIBCO recommends using a live TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog instance only in the development environment. All other environments, including test, pre-production, and production can use the off-line files, which are easily version controlled and tagged in conjunction with the developed code.
In summary, carefully plan how to use the TIBCO Fulfillment Catalog in your organization in conjunction with your business requirements.