Use the Software Catalog application to manage the names of discovered software in the Maximo® database through the use of conversion variants. A conversion variant is simply an alias of the preferred software name.
You can use an existing or new software catalog record to define the naming conventions for software, provided the software data was imported from a source other than the separately available Software Knowledge Base Toolkit or Asset Discovery for z/OS® products. Names that originate from the latter sources must be managed by them. You cannot rename a software catalog record whose data originated from the knowledge base or Asset Discovery for z/OS (the records are read-only), nor can you use the records themselves as variants. Software Knowledge Base Toolkit and Asset Discovery for z/OS control those relationships. You can, however, add as variants to Software Knowledge Base Toolkit or Asset Discovery for z/OS records catalog records that were imported from discovery tools.
Because software found by other discovery tools is often named inconsistently, you will usually need to establish a naming convention for that software. Their software catalog records are also read-only and cannot be renamed. But if already named correctly, other catalog records can be assigned to them as conversion variants. (If you could rename the catalog records themselves rather than use variants, the new names would be overwritten in the database the next time, and every time, fresh data was imported from the discovery tool.)
Any existing or new software catalog record that defines the naming convention must have a target name that is the preferred name for the software. If no existing catalog record has the preferred name, you can define a new catalog record with the preferred name, as described in Adding software to the catalog manually. You can then specify as conversion variants all software catalog records with variations of that name, so that thereafter they will be referred to only by the preferred name in the Software Catalog and Computers applications.
The steps for defining conversion variants follow.