Merge Workflow to reduce manual merging

Tim__D

I'd like to create a workflow that handles merging as much as possible for my organization. (non-conflicting merges). In the past an automatic merge process was implemented but failed in a few areas. Mostly because it placed the merge task in the hands of common users who did not know how to merge the conflicts and ignored them. It was also submittion based not edition based which is what we need.

Here is what I'm thinking of. Create a workflow with a target workarea field and another for the source branch EDITION. Once the workflow is instanciated I thought I would have the following tasks.

1). Update task to get latest in the target workarea.
2). External task using iwcmp.exe to compare the files in the WORKAREA to an EDITION. This script would need to parse the files into groups. Files in conflict and files newer in the EDITION. Files newer in the WORKAREA are not needed.
3). Update task to copy the files newer in the EDITION into the workarea
4). External task using iwmerge.ipl to resolve the non-overlapping conflicts
5). Email notification to iw_user of a merge task to handle overlapping conflicts
6). Submit the modified files
7). Merge screen to handle overlapping conflicts with STAGING
8). Use iwupdate.exe to get latest in other workareas
9). Merge screen to handle overlapping conflicts with other workareas
10). Regenerate workareas(Optional)(Perhaps an option when the workflow is instanciated)
11). Submit merged files and any iw_user modified files in workareas
12). Create Edition

Any thoughts on this? Does this seem like a good approach using Interwoven tools?

Sailesh

Sounds like a very good approach, we are infact using something very very similar to this for our merge process and it is working fine.