Importing Data into CTM:People in Remedy ITSM (Incident Management)

CTM:People Overview

If you are implementing BMC Remedy ITSM (aka, “remedy helpdesk”, Remedy Incident Management, etc) – you’ll end up import Customer and staff records into the CTM:People form at some point.  Assuming, of course, that you are not insane and intend to enter them manually. 

The Remedy ITSM suite uses People data for all of the following: 

• User login name
• User rights management
• Customer/Contact information

In most environments all of this data exists in other places or will be compiled before the system is fully implemented.  Consequently it is necessary to formulate a strategy for each of these data sources so the data can be used efficiently.

Ideally data will not be imported into the system unless there is a plan in place to perform automated updates in the future.  The only exception to this would be the creation of new users which may occur in a non-predictable fashion.  These would be added by the system administrator.  Even in that case templates should be added for most user roles to make sure user roles are consistent.  But that’s a blog post for another day.

The following basic facts about the Remedy system are relevant: 

• In the OOB application the “Customer” (caller) must exist in the CTM:People form prior to saving an Incident.
• The best (in terms of least customization) method to deal with Customer data is to pre-populate the data in the forms.  Populating the data at the time of the call will require a great deal of customization and testing.
• If you have different data sources duplicate data may exist.  It may be impossible that to prevent this from happening since unique identifiers might not exist across systems.  You’ll have to decide if that makes sense to your organization.

Remedy People Fields

All people in the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite applications are shared in the CTM:People form.

The following fields are required in the CTM:People data form and you’ll have to map data into them. 

Field Label	Field Type	Mandatory	Possible Values
Client Sensitivity	Selection	Yes	Sensitive Standard
Client Type	Selection	Yes	Office-Based Employee Field-Based Employee Home-Based Employee Contractor Customer Prospect Vendor
Company	Character	Yes	Valid configured OC
First Name	Character	Yes	Free form text
Last Name	Character	Yes	Free form text
Phone Number Business	Character	Yes	Free form text
Profile Status	Selection	Yes	Proposed Enabled Offline Obsolete Archive Delete
Submitter	Character	Yes	Default to $USER$
Support Staff	Selection	Yes	Yes No
VIP	Selection	Yes	Yes No

And there is one more thing – make sure you populate the hidden “full name” field.  It gets used for displays a lot but it’s not a mandatory field to save the entry.

Enjoy!  Importing people is usually one of the least fun parts of an implementation – it has to be done right, every time.  But once you get this done the rest is easy.