About Endeca Workbench

In addition to Developer Studio, the Endeca distribution includes another tool called Endeca Workbench. Endeca Workbench is an optional, Web-based application that contains a complementary set of functionality to that found in Developer Studio.

Unlike Developer Studio, which provides a rich development environment for configuring all aspects of an Endeca implementation, Endeca Workbench focuses on a smaller set of common, every day provisioning, configuration and maintenance tasks. This reduced focus gives Endeca Workbench a smaller footprint that can exist within the bounds of a Web-based application.

Endeca Workbench is a Web-based tool intended for business users and system administrators. For business user information, see the Endeca Workbench User's Guide. Endeca Workbench fully interacts with the EAC Central Server for provisioning and system operations, it lets you configure some aspects of your instance configuration and allows provisioning and system operations.

With Endeca Workbench, system administrators can perform any of the following tasks:

Provision the hosts available to an Endeca implementation.
Provision the applications available to an Endeca implementation.
Provision the scripts, such as the report generator script and the baseline update script, to an Endeca implementation.
Configure SSL settings, report generation, and set up a preview application for dynamic business rule testing.
Perform system operations such as running baseline updates or starting and stopping the MDEX Engine or Log Server.
Monitor the status of system components such as Forge, Dgidx , MDEX Engine, Log Server, and Report Generator.

Endeca Workbench and Developer Studio require the Endeca Application Controller (EAC) to control and communicate with other components and hosts in an Endeca implementation.

The two primary audiences for Endeca Workbench are:

Business users who define business logic such as merchandising/content-spotlighting rules and thesaurus entries.
System administrators who provision, maintain, monitor and manage an Endeca implementation.

Endeca Workbench allows business users to make changes to parts of an Endeca implementation after the pipeline and instance configuration features has been developed for the application in Developer Studio. For example, a developer uses Developer Studio to specify which Endeca properties and dimensions are available for search, then a business user uses Endeca Workbench to specify thesaurus entries that support search functionality, and a developer uses Endeca Workbench to provision an application and Endeca IAP components to the EAC Central Server.

Endeca Workbench provides administrators with features that provision all parts of the Endeca implementation, start, edit and stop components and scripts, monitor the status of an Endeca implementation, and download an implementation's instance configuration for debugging and troubleshooting purposes.

For both audiences, Endeca Workbench provides access to reports that describe how end-users are using an Endeca implementation, for example, the most popular search terms, the most popular navigation locations, search terms that are most often misspelled, and so forth

Note: For the most part, you can use Developer Studio to make the same changes that a non-technical user might make in Endeca Workbench. One exception is the changing the state of dynamic business rules, such as from Inactive to Active.

You can share the work on a project with others in your organization. For example, you might use Developer Studio to create dynamic business rule zones, styles, and rule groups, and then pass the project to a colleague on your marketing team, who could use Endeca Workbench to create and test the dynamic business rules themselves.

In Endeca Workbench, it is possible for multiple users to log in and make non-conflicting changes at the same time. However, between Endeca Workbench and Developer Studio, there is no built-in allowance for concurrent users. Therefore, to prevent changes from being overwritten or otherwise lost, a project should be active in only one of these applications at a time. For example, in the situation outlined above, after you send the project to the Web Studio user, you should wait until the Endeca Workbench user has finished making modifications before pulling the application back into Developer Studio for continued development.

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, whenever this document specifies Endeca Workbench, it applies to any of the Endeca Workbench tool suites, including IAP Workbench, Merchandising Workbench, and Publishing Workbench.