A Merchandising project associates a workflow with a set of assets. The workflow specifies the number and sequence of tasks that determine the project’s life cycle.

Tasks such as the following are part of a typical workflow:

The workflow also specifies whether to deploy only to a production target, or to a staging target as well. See Processes and Projects in the Content Administration Programming Guide. The chapter Setting Up Deployment in the same manual contains instructions to define the deployment topology.

Emergency Workflows

When a user selects an Emergency Project from the Merchandising menu, they initiate an emergency workflow. Emergency workflows are significantly different than standard projects as they allow users to make changes to a site that become available within minutes. In order to use an emergency workflow, the user must have the correct security settings.

Note: Emergency Projects are designed to be emergency deployments and should not be used as an alternative to standard deployment processes.

Emergency workflows are available for both Production-Only and Production/Staging environments. The Emergency Project, however, contains only two workflow tasks:

Workflow Security

The administrator can set access rights on a workflow and on its individual task elements. For information about this configuration, see the Managing User Access and Security and Project Workflows chapters in the Content Administration Programming Guide.

Customizing Workflows

By default, Merchandising projects use the common workflow that is found in:

<ATG11dir>/Publishing/base/config/atg/registry/data/epubworkflows/Common/
commonWorkflow.wdl

The business requirements at your site may require a custom workflow, with additional steps such as an email notification or an extra authorization step.

If you need to create a custom workflow, consider these cautions:

Important: All the workflows in use must use the same deployment model:

For information about the workflows that are included with ATG Content Administration, see the Project Workflows chapter of the Content Administration Programming Guide. In the same manual, the section Workflow Action Elements contains a list of workflow action elements.

The ACC provides the user interface for viewing, editing, and creating workflows. The application developer must create the custom workflow elements for your organization. For more information, see the following:

For information about modifying the user interface to accommodate workflow display, see Customizing the UI for Specific Tasks and Activities in the Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide.