Workspaces overview

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 your site. Working in the context of a workspace is similar to having your own private copy of the managed assets. You can make and preview changes without affecting managed assets outside the workspace. You can commit the changes that you make in a workspace to the production database, and see the effects of your changes on your site.

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
• 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

Workspaces are available in HCL Commerce Professional and Enterprise editions only. They are provided in an instance of HCL Commerce called an authoring environment. In addition to workspaces, an authoring environment provides all of the functions of a staging environment, including the staging utilities: stagingcopy and stagingprop.

Changes in workspaces are made on top of the production-ready data on the authoring environment. Production-ready data is data that is ready to be published to the production environment. Everyone who has access to the authoring environment can see this data, whether they are working within the context of a workspace.

Only production-ready data on the authoring environment is published to the production environment from the authoring environment. Data in workspaces is never published directly to the production environment.

Before using workspaces for the first time, synchronize a new authoring environment with the production environment.

The following diagram shows workspaces in the context of an authoring environment and a production environment. The diagram illustrates the relationship between the data in workspaces, authoring environment, and production environment:

Because workspaces introduce another way to change your store, ensure that you have business processes implemented to ensure the integrity of your store and its data.

Workspace Management tool

Recommended: As a workspace manager, you can use the Workspace Management tool in Management Center to manage and edit workspaces, its tasks groups, and tasks. It provides a single view across all workspaces and all tasks in the workspaces where managers can see how work is progressing. You can use the Workspace Management tool to change 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: