Many of the items you create within the Business Control Center, such as segments, targeters, and content groups, as well as assets such as product images, price lists, and SKUs from applications such as Merchandising, must be published to your live sites along with any other items necessary for running the sites. These necessary items include individual pieces of content, images, style sheets, and the Web pages themselves. The process of publishing assets from a development environment to a 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 items in the Business Control Center:
Project: ATG Content Administration controls the lifecycle of items that are published to your Web sites through an entity called a project. A project contains a set of tasks that define the stages of the creation and publishing lifecycle. Typically, 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 home page on a 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. For example, Merchandising assets include products, SKUs, and price lists. Personalization assets include user segments, targeters, and content groups. In several places in the Business Control Center interface, asset is used as a generic term for these items.
Versioning: As well as managing the creation and deployment of assets, ATG Content Administration performs a type 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, a second version is created, and versions 1 and 2 are both stored in the system. This behavior has two purposes: it prevents conflicts when two or more people edit 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 Content Administration Guide for Business Users and the Content Administration Programming Guide.
