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Catalog Admin Publishes a Service Catalog
Help a catalog admin turn approved IT offerings into an organized, discoverable catalog that employees can use to submit complete and fulfillable requests.
Use Case at a Glance
Persona: A catalog admin responsible for organizing, governing, and releasing IT service offerings
Job to be done: Publish a focused set of service processes so eligible employees can find, request, and track the right IT services
Starting point: Unified Catalog is available, and the company has approved service offerings, owners, intake requirements, fulfillment plans, and employee access
Successful outcome: Employees can find the intended offerings in the correct categories, submit valid requests, and receive trackable records that reach the responsible fulfillment team.
Use this scenario to decide whether a catalog release is ready for employees. See the linked Help topics for procedures to assign access, create service processes, configure forms and fulfillment, build catalogs, and configure portal components.
Define a Focused Catalog Release
Start with one employee need or one related group of offerings. Examples include hardware requests, software access, account support, or workplace services. A focused release makes naming, findability, eligibility, request quality, and fulfillment easier to validate before expansion.
| Release Decision | Catalog Admin Question | Evidence of Readiness |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Which employees require each offering? | Eligibility and permissions match the intended audience. |
| Findability | What words and categories do employees use to find it? | Names, descriptions, categories, and search terms are clear. |
| Intake | What information does fulfillment require? | The intake form collects required data without unnecessary questions. |
| Record outcome | Which record represents the submitted request? | The target data model creates a Case, Incident, or Service Request as designed. |
| Fulfillment | Who or what completes the request? | Manual routing, automation, approvals, and integrations have accountable owners. |
| Success measure | What proves that the release works? | Findability, completion, routing, and fulfillment have acceptance criteria. |
Unified Catalog centralizes IT products and services and gives employees one organized view of available offerings. For the product model and intended outcome, see Unified Catalog for IT Services and Key Components of the Unified Catalog for IT Services.
Prepare Each Service Process
Choose an IT service template when its data model, intake form, and fulfillment logic fit the offering. Create a service process when the offering requires a different design. Templates reduce setup work, but the catalog admin still reviews the installed components, connections, mappings, and employee experience.
For each service process, confirm its target data model, attributes, intake form, fulfillment approach, associated knowledge, eligibility rules, and integrations. Test the complete request path with representative inputs and failure conditions. When an offering uses a third-party connection, verify the connection and every dependent flow before release.
Activate the service process only after its configuration passes the release criteria. Activation makes the service process functional, but activation alone doesn't make it visible to employees. For the canonical template and activation workflow, see Install and Activate Service Catalog Templates. For the complete setup sequence, see Set Up Unified Catalog for IT Services.
Organize Offerings for Discovery
Create a Service Process catalog with effective dates and categories that reflect employee intent rather than internal team structure. Keep category names distinct, place each offering where employees expect it, and avoid publishing near-duplicate service processes. Use search and knowledge associations to support employees who don't begin from a category.
Add only reviewed service processes to the release. An active service process can coexist with a draft version in the catalog workspace, so confirm the status of each associated item. Verify eligibility from the employee perspective because catalog membership doesn't override audience restrictions or missing permissions.
For the canonical catalog-building procedure, see Create a Catalog. For employee discovery through categories, search, knowledge articles, and intake forms, see Use the IT Service Catalog as an Employee.
Publish to the Employee Channel
Associate the intended catalog with the Unified Catalog component on the Employee Services portal. If the component doesn't specify a catalog record, the portal can show all active service processes in the org. Use an explicit catalog association when the release requires controlled scope.
Publish the portal changes after the catalog, service processes, permissions, and component configuration pass validation. Treat portal publication and service-process activation as separate controls. The first releases the site configuration, and the second controls whether a service process is functional.
For the canonical portal configuration and publication steps, see Set Up Service Catalog for the Employee Services Portal. Keep Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Agentforce channel setup in their linked Help topics rather than repeating those procedures here.
Validate the Employee-to-Fulfillment Journey
Test as an eligible employee and as a user outside the intended audience. Confirm that the offering appears only for the correct users, can be found through expected categories or search terms, and provides enough context to choose it confidently.
Submit a controlled test request. Verify that the intake form collects the required information, creates the intended record type, routes to the correct owner or automation, and provides a status that the employee can track. Confirm that unsuccessful integrations or incomplete inputs produce a recoverable path rather than an abandoned request.
The adoption milestone is a successful employee request that reaches fulfillment with usable data. A catalog with many active offerings but poor findability, incomplete intake, or broken routing isn't ready for broad adoption.
Govern the Published Catalog
Assign an owner and review interval to each offering. Monitor search gaps, abandoned intake forms, request volume, routing corrections, fulfillment failures, completion time, and employee feedback. Revise descriptions, categories, eligibility, forms, or automation when the evidence shows friction.
Remove obsolete or duplicate offerings from employee channels without erasing the history of completed requests. Coordinate catalog changes with service owners and fulfillment teams so that employees don't discover offerings that the company no longer supports.
Confirm That Catalog Publishing Is Ready
Before using this journey as an adoption test, confirm the required Unified Catalog licenses and role-based permission sets. Catalog admins require access to manage the catalog and its underlying metadata. Employees and support reps require the matching runtime access. See Request Management Permissions for IT Services.
