System and method for software integration and factory deployment

1. A method for managing computer production in an enterprise, comprising:

receiving a block of software offerings, each block being associated with at least one product series, wherein a software offering includes at least one software class and at least one associated software specification, the software class being a specific type of software, software offerings being associated with respective product series to establish a configuration, specifications being individual software items that are associated with classes wherein a specification is an option that a customer may choose within a class, wherein a class may have more than one specification while a specification is assigned to only one class, software offerings being associated with respective individual product series to establish a configuration range, a configuration range for a stock keeping unit (SKU) representing a product when region, language, various operating system versions, and platforms are factored, a configuration range being a list of all the software offerings that are offered for a respective SKU;

receiving a product series component structure defining parts for a respective product series;

adding parts required for a product series to the block associated with the series, parts being assigned to each software class and related software specification pair in a block based on the part or parts required for the pair to thereby define a design structure;

storing the data structure on a tangible computer readable medium; and

establishing a software bill of materials (BOM) on the computer readable medium based on the design structure using at least one of: a template and/or a snapshot; and

accessing the computer readable medium to provide software on a computer.

2. The method of claim 1 , comprising associating defects with related classes.

3. The method of claim 2 , comprising associating corrective actions with respective defects.

4. The method of claim 3 , comprising associating a respective installation file with each software offering, each installation file including a data file format version number, a version number of an installation data snapshot, an installation order for modules, data required for confirming successful installation, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) data for each binary file, path information for locating files in a file store, partition size information for recovery and customer partitions.

5. The method of claim 4 , wherein installation and recovery tools use a list of software releases directly instead of microcode, which is used only for customer recovery, with microcode bit mappings being constrained to respective recovery media sets.