Many of the items you create within the ATG Business Control Center, such as segments, targeters, and content groups, as well as assets such as product images, price lists and SKUs from applications like ATG Merchandising, must be published to your live site along with any other items necessary for the site. These necessary items include individual content items, images, style sheets, and the Web pages themselves. The process of publishing assets from a development environment to the live site is managed by ATG Content Administration. The following are some key ATG Content Administration terms that you need to be familiar with when you create and edit targeting items in the ATG Business Control Center:
Project -- ATG Content Administration controls the lifecycle of items that are published to your Web site through an entity called a project. A project contains a configurable number of tasks, which define the stages of the process that makes up the creation and publishing lifecycle. Typically, these tasks include authoring, approval, and deployment. Tasks can be completed by different users. For example, the approval task could be completed by a supervisor, and the deployment task could be performed by a Web site administrator.
Often, a project represents a logical grouping of items related to a particular business goal. For example, you could have a project called “New home page” that contains all the items you need to create a new home page on your site. Another example might be a project called “Executive bios” that you use to deploy updated versions of executive biographies to your corporate information pages. Any number of items can be managed and deployed by a single project.
Asset -- In ATG Content Administration, any item that you create, edit, and deploy is referred to as an asset. Different ATG applications have their own types of assets, which are managed by ATG Content Administration. For ATG Merchandising, for example, assets include product SKUs and price lists. For ATG Personalization, assets are user segments, targeters, and content groups. In several places in the ATG Business Control Center interface, “asset” is used as a generic term for these targeting items.
Versioning -- As well as managing the creation and deployment of assets, ATG Content Administration performs a form of source control, called “versioning,” on each asset. When you create an asset, the system gives it the number 1. When you or another user edits the asset later, a second version is created, and both versions 1 and 2 are stored in the system. This behavior has two purposes: it prevents conflicts when two or more people are editing the same asset, and it allows you to recover from errors by reverting to a previous version of an asset at any time.
For detailed information on any of these terms, or for more information about versioning and deployment, refer to the ATG Content Administration Guide for Business Users and the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide.
