Administer > Manage WebSphere Commerce features > Workspace Administration Tool

Workspaces

A workspace is an access-controlled work area where you can make and preview changes to managed assets, without affecting what is currently running on the site.

A workspace your own private copy of the managed assets. Once you are happy with your changes, you can commit the changes to the production database.

Workspaces features...

1. Task groups and tasks for dividing work
2. Defined roles for approvals, and contributing content
3. A tool for creating workspaces
4. Locking policies to control changes
5. Commit and publish to control how data is moved from task groups to the production-ready data and the production data

Workspaces are available in...

• WebSphere Commerce Professional
• WebSphere Commerce Enterprise

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
• fileprop

Production-ready data is ready to be published to the production server. Everyone who has access to the authoring server can see this data. If a user logs onto 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:

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 the store, ensure that you have strong business processes implemented to ensure the integrity of the store and its data.

Workspaces in the Management Center

You can use the Tasks tool in the Management Center to make changes to workspace content or select the Work on Approved Content option to work outside the workspace. The following diagram displays the division of tasks between each tool:

Use workspaces with an extended sites store model.

• Author server
  An authoring server is a staging server that has workspaces enabled. Business users use an authoring server to control site changes.

• Workspaces roles
  The following workspaces roles are supported by WebSphere Commerce:
  • Workspace Manager
  • Workspace Task Group Approver
  • Workspace Content Contributor

    
    

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