Concurrent workflow

Hi All :

In a workflow that our clients want us to build, we are required to send a DCR to multiple content contributors simultaneously. Each one of those contributors may make changes to the DCR and then submit for approvals to may be multiple people.

How do I code for something like this?? How will TS merge all the changes that different people have made to the original DCR.??

Also is there a way where TS can provide functionality like MS Word where a user can TRACK CHANGES made to a DCR while the DCR is in a workflow. What the user wants to do is visually see all that has happened to a DCR while it has gone thorugh edits at multiple stages.

Thanks

Ashish

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Comments

akshathp

I am sure you can start something on the grounds of TeamSite Out of the box worklfow "Concurrent approval". And ofcourse submit on TeamSite can be used for merging the content too.

For tracking changes, you would at present need to come up with custom application that can keep track of this. Maybe with DataDeploy you could store content and changes in database and then parse it on the fly...

Hope this helps!

Akshat Pramod Sharma
Interwoven Inc.

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Migrateduser

It is actually tricky to have concurrent user tasks that edit a DCR (or any file). Typically we encourage practices that avoid creating conflicting changes in the first place, and the way we typically do that is with locking. However, you cannot have concurrent user tasks (with different owners) that lock a file in the same workarea since only one user can hold the lock at a time. You could let users edit the DCR in separate workareas, but something or someone would then have to reconcile the changes. TeamSite cannot automatically merge changes because it cannot judge who's changes are more important and how multiple changes may be related to one another.

It is easy to implement a workflow with a series of edit (user) tasks, but then you serialize the edits in a fixed order. You could create a workflow that permits only one contributor to modify the file at a time -- without a predetermined sequence -- by implementing parallel paths where each path has three tasks:
(1) A CGI task where the user indicates they are ready to start working. This would grab the lock, if it is available, and then transition to the second task...
(2) A user task where the user performs work, and
(3) An external task that releases the lock.

The concurrent review workflow that we supply as an example avoids this problem by making the review tasks readonly.

I don't think Templating has any windows that show you all of the versions of a DCR at one time. You can of course view the entire history of the file and any one of its versions individually.

Brinko Kobrin
Interwoven Staff Engineer

Adam Stoller

To reinforce Brinko's post - I recently had to do something like this for a customer and we had to accept certain aspects of the system as a given:
1) The concurrent edits MUST take place in DIFFERENT workareas
2) The first user to edit the file will not see any warning, all subsequent users trying to edit the file will receive a warning that the file is already being edited (NOTE: they currently have to be in the role 'Editor' or above) - and they have to signifiy their receipt of this warning by clicking the "OK" button.
3) The person who was, in effect, initiating the request for the current edits, had to be responsible for merging the different copies of the file (we created a custom CGI script for doing this)

This is definitely *not* a trivial set of operations.

We do have an add-on piece called VisualAnnotate which **might** solve some of the issues - but there are still some limitations that need to be understood.
1) With VisualAnnotate - you'd actually be pushing the GENERATED PAGE around for review and "modification" - not the DCR itself.
2) VisualAnnotate currently only supports SERIAL review process, but the ability to annotate on the screen tends to make the process faster in many cases than a concurrent review scenario. (They're looking at ways to try an d support concurrent reviews, but at this time there is no commitment to any time-frame for this functionality)

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)