Administering workspaces

Workspaces provide a powerful and flexible way to manage and preview changes to your e-commerce website without affecting the live production environment.

In HCL Commerce+, workspaces act as isolated, access-controlled environments where content contributors, developers, and business users can create, modify, and preview changes to managed assets such as catalogs, promotions, and pricing. Once changes are finalized and approved, you can publish them to the production environment, ensuring a seamless and controlled content management process.

Workspaces are particularly useful in environments where more than one team work on updates and development. They enable parallel development, staging, preview capabilities, and downtime during updates.

Key Features of Workspace

Isolated Workspace: Workspaces provide a isolated environment where changes can be made and previewed without impacting the live env. This isolation ensures that ongoing site operations are not disrupted during the development or content update process.
Managed Assets: You can update, preview and deploy a wide range of assets, such as catalogs, promotions, and pricing, from inside your workspaces. You can develop or modify these assets within the workspace and publish them to your production environment once they are approved.
Locking Policies: Workspaces include configurable locking policies that control how changes are made and who can make them. Locking policies prevent conflicts by ensuring that only one user or team can modify a specific asset at a time.
Publishing and Commit Options: Changes made in a workspace can be committed to the production database and published to the live site. This step ensures that only approved and tested changes are deployed.

How workspaces fit into the Commerce+ ecosystem

Workspaces are an integral part of the HCL Commerce+ content management and development and deployment system. You can integrate workspaces and their associated processes into your workflow in many ways, such as the following:

Content Management: Workspaces enable your business users and content contributors to manage and update site content in a controlled environment. They have full lattitude to create and modify catalogs, promotions, pricing, and other managed assets, for example to experiment with new marketing approaches.
Development and Testing: To reduce the risk of introducing errors into production, your developers can use workspaces to test new features and customizations without affecting the live environment.
Collaboration: Workspace facilitate collaboration between teams by providing a shared environment for making and reviewing changes.
Deployment: Once changes are finalized and approved, they are published to the production environment in a controlled manner. The checks and balances built into the deployment process ensure that only tested and validated updates appear on the live site.