Workspaces
A workspace is an isolated access-controlled work area in which you can make and preview changes to managed assets without affecting managed assets and users outside the area. Working in the context of a workspace is similar to having your own private copy of the managed assets. You can make changes and preview changes without affecting managed assets outside the workspace. Content changed in a workspace can be seen and previewed only by those authorized to access the workspace.
Workspaces give business users the ability to control site changes in the following ways:
- Assign work
- Sending notifications
- Executing site changes to product, content, promotions and campaigns
- Previewing changes
- Approving changes
- Scheduling when changes go into production
Workspaces are available in WebSphere Commerce Professional and Enterprise editions only. They are provided in an instance of WebSphere Commerce called an authoring server. In addition to workspaces, an authoring server provides all of the functions of a staging server including the staging utilities: stagingcopy, stagingprop, stagingcheck, and fileprop.
Changes in workspaces are made on top of the production-ready data on the authoring server. Production-ready data is data that is ready to be published to the production server. Everyone who has access to the authoring server can see this data, whether or not they are working within the context of a workspace. If a user logs onto WebSphere Commerce Accelerator on the authoring server and chooses not to work in a workspace, the user still has access to the production-ready data.
Only production-ready data on the authoring server is published to the production server from the authoring server. Data in workspaces is never published directly to the production server.
Before using workspaces for the first time, synchronize a new authoring server with the production server.
The following diagram shows workspaces in the context of an authoring server and a production server and the relationship between the data in workspaces, authoring server, and production server:
staging server and production server. The diagram also shows the data relationships between workspaces, production-ready data, and production data." />
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Workspaces offer the following features:
- Task groups and tasks for dividing work within workspaces
- Defined roles for managing workspaces, workspace-related approvals, and contributing content
- A separate tool for creating and administering workspaces
- Locking policies to control changes within a workspace
- Various forms of commit and publish to control how data is moved from task groups to the production-ready data and the production data
Because workspaces introduce another way to change your store, ensure that you have strong business processes implemented to ensure the integrity of your store and its data.
Related Concepts
Authoring server
Workspaces, task groups, and tasks
Workspace managed assets
Workspaces roles
Workspace Administration Tool
Related tasks
Enabling Workspaces
Synchronizing an authoring server with a production server
Related Reference
Workspaces best practices
Workspaces data model
Workspaces commit and publishing options
Known limitations in workspaces