A Web site that serves assets managed by ATG Content Administration requires:
A Content development environment—that is, an authoring and editing environment that runs ATG Content Administration and is configured to manage multiple versions of assets.
A Production environment that is configured to receive deployments of assets from the content development environment.
Content development environment
The following diagram outlines the configuration of a content development environment:
This diagram illustrates several important concepts about the content development environment:
The content development environment uses a versioned database schema. The asset management server’s database schema is configured to store successive versions of assets, including version metadata.
Because a production environment does not use a versioned database schema, it is isolated from the content development environment.
Versioned repository assets and file asset metadata are stored in the versioned database. The actual versioned file assets are stored in a file system.
To facilitate scalability, and improve performance and reliability, you can cluster multiple asset management servers.
Production environment
The following diagram illustrates the basic configuration of a production environment where ATG Content Administration-managed assets are deployed:
Note: ATG servers in a production environment can run earlier versions of ATG Content Administration versions. For more information, see Deploy to Targets with Earlier Product Versions.
The preceding diagram illustrates several important concepts about the production environment:
The production environment does not use a versioned schema. When you deploy a specific version of an asset to your production environment, its version metadata is excluded.
The DeploymentManager moves assets from the content development environment to the production environment. However, each target site server runs an agent that handles deployment-related tasks on that server.
Two types of agents run on target sites:
Publishing agents run on the ATG servers. These agents are configured to manage deployment-related tasks for repository and file assets on the target site.
Publishing Web agents run on the Web servers. These agents are configured to manage deployment-related tasks for file assets on the target Web server.
The preceding diagram shows a production environment with a single ATG cluster, where multiple ATG instances point to the same data stores. However, a target site can include multiple ATG clusters. For simplification, it also indicates a configuration for Online deployment; however, a production environment should always be configured to use Switch deployment.