This section defines essential ATG content development terms.

Assets

Assets are persistent, publishable objects that are used by one or more ATG applications. ATG Content Administration supports two kinds of assets:

If a file asset is created in an external application, you can upload the file into ATG Content Administration. Users can edit the item either through the Business Control Center or by downloading the file, changing it and uploading the file again.

In this guide, asset refers generally to repository and file assets. The terms file asset and repository asset are used for more specific references.

For technical information on file and repository assets, see the chapter Understanding the Content Development Environment in this guide. For information on working with assets in the Business Control Center, see the chapter Creating and Managing Assets in the ATG Content Administration Guide for Business Users.

Project

A project is a persistent entity that encompasses additions, changes and deletions to a set of assets. Each project moves independently through a workflow that typically includes these tasks:

Project objects are defined by the project item-descriptor in the publishing.xml repository definition file, located in:

<ATG10dir>/Publishing/base/config/atg/epub

Project Workflow

Project Workflows define and control the user tasks that make up a project and modify its state. Project workflows also define actions that are triggered by state changes, such as workspace check-in, email notification, and tagging of versions for deployment. For more information, see Project Workflows.

Process

A process is the parent object of a Project Workflow.

Process objects are defined by the process item-descriptor in the publishing.xml repository definition file.

Versioning

ATG Content Administration maintains versions of all assets, to ensure that the latest changes are deployed to target sites, and to coordinate multi-user access to the same asset. For more information, see Versioning Assets.

Task

A task is a step in a workflow, such as Author, Review, or Deploy. For more information, see the Managing Tasks chapter in the ATG Content Administration Guide for Business Users.

Deployment

ATG Content Administration defines a deployment model that incorporates server clusters for development, staging, and production. You can modify the workflow that is provided with ATG Content Administration so its deployment process suits your specific requirements. For example, you can deploy to several servers at the same time; or you can define staged deployments in a staging/production workflow, which lets you review assets on a staging server before deploying them to production and checking them in.