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Welcome to Useful Tiny Little Things, a series of topics that I will publish in the Process Automation blog. My name is Leandro Cassa and I work at IBM as the CCMDB Level 3 support team leader. The purpose of this series is to provide useful simple things that we sometimes have no idea exist. These tips apply to CCMDB, Tivoli Asset Management for IT, Service Request Manager, and other products based on Tivoli's process automation engine.
This week we'll get deeper into the Launch In Context feature. Launch In Context, as the name states, enables you to launch an external system (URL) in a given context. In this case the context is our Tivoli Process Automation Engine Application context. For example, if you are using the Organization application you could provide an external system data from your actual context, for example field values.
It is a very useful feature. Change and Configuration Management Database (a Tivoli Process Automation Engine-based product) uses it out of the box to provide visual integration with Tivoli Application Dependency And Discovery Manager (TADDM).
If you have CCMDB installed and Launch In Context was setup during or post install you can check it out. Click Go To > IT Infrastructure > Actual CI, select a record and click on the select action > View Actual CI Topology > Business Application.
Then you get the following screen:
I wrote a wiki paper that describes how to use Launch In Context. It describes an example implementation using Google Maps. If you like the idea, refer to my paper post right here (http://ibm.co/nhaXcn)
The result is very nice. If you are at the People Application and the person record you selected has an address and site with Billing and Ship address you get something similar to the following:
In this example, I pin addresses on a static map. Of course, the purpose of the paper is to introduce the concepts to you and walk you through a simple example, to enable you to do much more.
That's it for this week. Hope this helps.
Leandro Cassa
Leandro Cassa
