Products (also referred to as features or SKUs (stock-keeping units)) are the items publishers sell to their customers. Each entitlement is assigned a product. A product may represent a license, a maintenance agreement, technical support, a renewal, or a physical item.
Most products are loaded into Poetic using a flat file, but you can also create and edit products manually. See Adding and editing products for information on creating and editing products in Poetic.
You can also export product in order to import them into another instance or an external system. See Exporting products to a file for details.
Each product belongs to a product family.
A product family is a group of very similar products that are managed in the same way but have slightly different attributes.
For example, a product family for a word processor may consist of all of the different languages, revisions, and platforms associated with that product:
In Poetic, the available product families are configured using the custom property maintenance function. For information on configuring custom properties, see Editing custom properties.
Product lines provide a higher level of hierarchy for products. Product lines can group products from multiple families, and are especially useful for very complex products that have many features.
For example, a PBX system may have hundreds of features that can be turned on and off. Each of these features would be an individual product within the product line.
Or an office suite may be made up of multiple products (word processor, spreadsheet, email, presentation, and database). While each individual product may belong to a different product family, they all belong to the same product line.
Product lines are required for the activation process. A product line can be configured so that the entire product line must be activated together (as a whole).
For information on creating and editing product lines, see Adding and editing product lines.
Each product can be associated with a set of activation rules. The rules determine the information that users must provide when they activate the product. Poetic includes a function to create and edit rule sets to assign to products. See Adding and editing activation rule sets.
Along with the activation rules for the product, there may be activation limits for each version of the product family. Poetic includes a function for setting up these limits. See Adding and editing activation limits for product families.
A product may be assigned multiple activation components. Components are what are sent to the key generator Poetic includes a function for creating and editing components. See Adding and editing product components.