As explained elsewhere in this guide, campaigns are deployed to the target server specified in the ATG Outreach project workflow. ATG Outreach 9.3 includes two workflows, a single-target workflow that is typically used to deploy campaigns to a production server, and a dual-target workflow that can be used to deploy to both a staging server and a production server. The use of a staging server allows you to test campaigns before you deploy them to your live site. You deploy first to the staging server, where you verify that the campaign works as designed. Then you deploy to the live production server, at which point the campaigns are visible to customers.
Other ATG products, for example ATG Content Administration and ATG Merchandising, also use staging servers for test purposes. With these products, you usually deploy exactly the same content to both staging and production. Because of the nature of campaigns, however, you cannot typically deploy exactly the same campaign to the production server that you deployed to the staging server. You must usually edit the campaign after you deploy it to the staging server so that it works correctly on the production server. For example, you typically would not include landing pages that refer to your production site in a test campaign, because visits by test users to those pages could affect report data.
You can determine whether or not your ATG Outreach installation is using a staging server by looking at the tasks in the campaign project workflow, which you can see in the Tasks tab for any campaign. In a staging environment, you should see two Approve tasks, Approve for Deployment to Staging and Approve for Deployment to Production. A production-only environment has only the second Approve task. (If you think your environment includes a staging server, but you do not see the appropriate Approve for Deployment to Staging task, make sure the ATG Outreach server has been started with the correct workflow option. See Starting ATG Outreach in the ATG Outreach Administration and Development Guide for more information.)
For information on configuring ATG Outreach so you can use it to test campaigns, refer to Configuring an ATG Outreach Staging Environment in the ATG Outreach Administration and Development Guide.
