Process: Maintenance workspace

 

Flow

Legend

 

Objective

Model the processes in which business users will provide maintenance changes to content on a regular basis.

 

Description

Workspaces were designed to support content changes that are made at regular intervals such as daily and weekly product or pricing updates. A persistent workspace specific for regular maintenance processes may be available and the Workspace Manager can allocate a persistent task groups for the change process required persistent task groups contain tasks that can be performed and completed an approved. However, after the data for a task group is approved and committed to the production-ready data on the authoring server, the task in the task group return to the active state so that the tasks can be performed again as part of the next maintenance interval.

Features:

• Persistent workspaces and task groups that are restarted immediately on completion to handle repetitive change processes.
• Store and site level preview of content changes within a workspace with preview contexts enabled.
• Template support to allow task groups to be created and activated from task group templates to create similar change processes.
• Scheduled completion of events.
• Option to have contributors notified by email when task groups activated, or approvers notified when all tasks for task group are completed.
• Multiple active and concurrent task groups and workspaces.
• Locking capabilities to prevent simultaneous update to content from different workspaces or task groups.
• Immediate commit of data from workspace to production-ready data on the authoring server and propagate to the production system.

 

Customization

• Workflow engine integration to replace Workspace Administrator tool.
• Custom event handlers for task and task group events within Workspace flow.
• Custom tables and resources enabled for workspaces.
• Integration of workspace and preview capabilities and static content repositories.

 

Edition

Enterprise, Professional

 

Tasks

Task	Description	Role
Activate workspace	Activate workspace   Objective Activate task groups within a workspace to begin change processes.   Description The Workspace Manager creates one or more task groups to model the change process and adds tasks assigned to one or more users designated as Workspace Content Contributors to complete the work for the task. Task groups can be created specific to the workspace or can be created from existing modeled processes stored as templates. A task group controls the scope of changes within the workspace. The set of changes within a task group is committed to the production-ready data when all the tasks within the task group are complete or the Workspace Manager can specify one or more users to approve the changes before being committed. A task group can be designated as single-use which completes and when the data is committed to production ready data or persistent in which the task group will restart along with all tasks each time the task group commits to the production ready data. Task groups and tasks can have descriptive details to instruct the contributors and approvers of the change process to be performed. The quick fix and event based processes will likely consist of single-use task groups while, while Workspace managers will create a persistent, repetitive task group for their regular maintenance processes. The task group may model any of the following existing WebSphere Commerce business processes:   Features See processes.   Customization See processes.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	Workspace Manager
Approve tasks	Objective Allow workflow approval of changes within task group.   Description The Workspace Task Group Approver approves content for the task group which will then be ready to commit to the production-ready data by the system. The system can handle committing to the production-ready data and propagating the content to the Production Server in several ways: Commit to the production-ready data and publish the changes made within this task group to production immediately. Commit to the production-ready data immediately and publish the content as part of the next scheduled global publish. Schedule the commit to production-ready data for a specific time in the future and then publish the content as part of a separately scheduled global publish. Schedule both the commit to the production-ready data and publish the changes made within the task group for a specific time in the future.   Features See processes.   Customization See processes.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	Workspace Task Group Approver
Contribute content in task	Objective Create, update, or delete content as part of a workspace change process.   Description Workspace Content Contributors are business users who are able to use the WebSphere Commerce tools such as the Loader utilities or Accelerator to work on content. Workspace Content Contributors must provide or select the task they are working on and create, update or delete the content required to complete their task. They can also view and test their changes on the store front within the workspace they are working on before completing the task they are working on. The Workspace Content Contributor can also add descriptive information into the task group comments to describe details of the changes. Upon completion of all changes, the task group will be ready for approval and the approver is notified. If no approver is specified, the task group will be complete and will be committed to the production-ready data.   Features See processes.   Customization See processes.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	Workspace Content Contributor
Notify approvers	Objective Notify Workspace Task Group Approvers when a task group is ready to approve.   Description Workspace task groups can be configured such that when all content for tasks within a task group are completed, a notification can be delivered to all users designated as approvers for the specific task group.   Features Email notification can be enabled or disabled.   Customization Email template and command may be overridden to deliver customized messages.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	System
Notify contributors	Objective Notify Workspace Content Contributors of active tasks that require their contribution.   Description Workspace task groups can be configured such that upon moving to active state, a notification can be delivered to all Workspace Content Contributors which are assigned to tasks within.   Features Email notification can be enabled or disabled.   Customization Email template and command may be overridden to deliver customized messages.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	System
Publish content	Objective Publish content from authoring server to the live production server database.   Description Content is moved from authoring server to production server database via publish operations. For task groups within a workspace designated for quick publish, the system will first commit the data within the task group to the production-ready data and then push the same data to the production server. Only data changed within the scope of that task group will be published to production by the system. For other task groups, the data will be committed to the production-ready data and publish then be initiated by an administrative user using the staging server utilities. The staging server utilities will push all or a subset of the content to production, but is not associated to any workspace task group.   Features See processes.   Customization See processes.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	System
Reject tasks	Objective Reject task group content changes and return to Workspace Content Contributors for rework.   Description The Workspace Task Group Approver can reject a task group using the Workspace Administration tool when the changes made within are not satisfactory. The task group will return to active state and will require each Workspace Content Contributor to complete the task within the task group again.   Features See processes.   Customization See processes.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	Workspace Task Group Approver
Validate content	Objective Validate and view content changes within a workspace for approval within a task group.   Description The Workspace Task Group Approver is a business user that is given the responsibility by the Workspace Manager to ensure that the changes made for a specific task group are appropriate. The Workspace Task Group Approver can enter into the workspace or task group that is assigned to them and view the content updates from the business tooling such as Accelerator or from the store front using preview. Upon reviewing the changes, the Workspace Task Group Approver has the following options: Approve the content and complete the task group Reject the task group and force tasks to be completed again Modify content within the approval task and complete the task group.   Features See processes.   Customization See processes.   Edition Enterprise, Professional	Workspace Task Group Approver

 

Business artifacts

• Authoring content
• Marketing plan
• Merchandising plan
• Notification to the approvers
• Notification to the contributors
• Production content
• Workspace

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