Product Management

ccprofessional

Hello,
I'm looking for best practises and any new ideas on how Products have been managed within TeamSite using DCTs.

I understand TS is not designed for managing products, but at the same time it could. Any comments on how it may be done will be great.

Specifically here are some requirements -

• We have potentially hundreds of products and kits (sets of products).
  
  
• all these products are currently in disparate sources (excel, access) and they will be brought in together within TS manually.
  
  
• Most products have common sets of features. (Eg., all Type A cell phones have battery type X and keypad Y, while Type B will have P, Q and R features).
  
  
• We would like to have a single Product Form/DCT that captures all the various products, leveraging FormAPI and potentially component DCTs, callouts or what not. The idea being that depending on the product and sub-product type selected within the Form, the various fields are dynamically made visible, ordered, etc. The idea is to provide a very user-friendly form that can capture all the product information manually.
  

I bet there are implementations out there that have some or all of these requirements. If you have run into these, could you please share your thoughts and comments?

Sorry for the long post.
Thanks

Ambuj

Hello, I'm looking for best practises and any new ideas on how Products have been managed within TeamSite using DCTs. I understand TS is not designed for managing products, but at the same time it could. Any comments on how it may be done will be great. Specifically here are some requirements - We have potentially hundreds of products and kits (sets of products). all these products are currently in disparate sources (excel, access) and they will be brought in together within TS manually. Most products have common sets of features. (Eg., all Type A cell phones have battery type X and keypad Y, while Type B will have P, Q and R features). We would like to have a single Product Form/DCT that captures all the various products, leveraging FormAPI and potentially component DCTs, callouts or what not. The idea being that depending on the product and sub-product type selected within the Form, the various fields are dynamically made visible, ordered, etc. The idea is to provide a very user-friendly form that can capture all the product information manually. I bet there are implementations out there that have some or all of these requirements. If you have run into these, could you please share your thoughts and comments? Sorry for the long post. Thanks

As I understand you probably need an asset management tool. But if you want to do it through TeamSite, I would like to suggest you below steps.

1. Create a Datacapture Form, which will capture all the information or set of features related to different products.

2. Manually create different DCRs for different products.

3. You can deploy this piece of information in your database using Data Deploy.

But if these information or features are not going to change then I really don’t understand why you want to keep them in TeamSite. XLS is good and easy to maintain if there’s not much change in the information.

Hope it helps.