Process: Special event workspace

 

Flow

Legend

 

Objective

Model a change process to handle a planned merchandising or marketing event or activity.

 

Description

Workspaces were designed to support merchandising or marketing events that are planned in advance of their deployment such as seasonal updates for a Christmas catalog or Valentine's Day promotion. Change processes like these may require interaction with multiple business users while spanning long periods of time. Workspaces allow such changes to be isolated until all work is complete without affecting other daily activities on the authoring server.

A single-use workspace and task groups can be created by a Workspace Manager to model the changes required to implement a special merchandising or marketing event. The special event workspace may use deferred or scheduling options that allow task groups to be completed, but all data remains isolated within the workspace until the scheduled time.

Features:

 

Customization

 

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
Complete workspace

 

Objective

Complete the single use workspace and release all resources for the workspace data source.

 

Description

When all task groups for a single use workspace are completed, the system will complete the workspace and release and remove all resources allocated.

 

Features

See processes.

 

Customization

See processes.

 

Edition

Enterprise, Professional

System
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
Create workspace

 

Objective

Create a workspace with task groups to model change processes.

 

Description

The Workspace Manager is the administrative business user that controls when content activities need to be created and updated on the site. The Workspace Manager creates a workspace that contains a separate data schema to store changes outside of the production-ready data on an authoring server. A workspace can be created as persistent where it will be available continuously or a workspace can be single-use where it will be removed once there are no longer any active task groups remaining..

The quick fix and regular maintenance processes will likely have a persistent workspace, while event based processes will likely use a single-use workspaces for each event.

 

Features

See processes.

 

Customization

See processes.

 

Edition

Enterprise, Professional

Workspace Manager
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

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