I am having a very difficult time with controlling various types of sprawl within our environment and I am attempting to keep the number of blueprints, business groups/reservations, and entitlements to a minimum while also enabling some collaboration for our users. Right now the only way I can see to share anything amongst a group of users is by using a business group and granting each member of that business group a support role. What I want is the same functionality we had in vCD where you can simply share a system with any user or group in the directory. If anyone has a better way of achieving this in vCAC please enlighten me.
If using a business group is my only option today I am curious if there is any way to hide a catalog item or allow for a catalog item to be deployed to a user even if they are not entitled to it. I am attempting to build out a more intelligent front end questionnaire for deploying things and I want this to be the only catalog item the end user is presented with. I can see users in our environments that would end up being members of 10's (even hundreds) of business groups depending on their role. Multiply that by all the blueprints and they are going to be presented with this giant messy catalog. Instead I'd prefer for them to go through the advanced services form that will gather all of the information about their deployment and deploy the system.
I'm thinking about adding/removing the user from an AD group or modifying the entitlement real time so they will only be entitled briefly to deploy but that is a total kludge even if it does work.
I'm patiently waiting for some simple collaborative features to emerge. Lab Manger had some pretty great features, vCD not so much but at least it had some ways of "sharing". I simply want to allow users to share what they have in the sense of access and also reproducing what they have done.