Imagine that Laura creates a new page for their content catalog. SmartEdit automatically sets the page status to Draft. But instead of editing and publishing the page and changing the page status on her own, she works together with other members of her content management team. Thus, she assigns the out-of-the-box available Page Approval and Translation workflow to the page, so that the page is translated, reviewed, and published by others.
When Laura starts the workflow, SmartEdit sets the status automatically to In Progress. As the page goes through the workflow tasks and each stakeholder edits or translates it, the status remains In Progress.
Once a member of the cmsreviewer group has approved all changes on the page, SmartEdit sets its status to Ready to Sync and delegates the task to the cmspublisher group.
When a member of the cmspublisher group finally triggers the Publish action of the workflow, SmartEdit automatically starts synchronizing the page to the online version of the catalog. When done, SmartEdit ends the workflow by setting the page status to Synched.
Let’s see this workflow in action in the next video:
WCMS Workflow Templates
WCMS workflows allow the Content Team to delegate tasks to other team members, review, and approve web content before they publish it to the Storefront.
Any workflow is derived from a workflow template. These templates are defined by developers and configured to restrict which users can edit, review, and approve content.
Note
Permission management is done for user groups like cmseditor, cmsreviewer, cmstranslator or cmspublisher. Individual users like Laura are then assigned to their respective group to receive permissions – so Laura and other team members become cmseditor, but her supervisor becomes cmsreviewer, and so on.
SAP Commerce Cloud provides two out-of-the-box workflow templates explicitly for content editing, reviewing, and publishing:
- Page Approval
- Page Translation and Approval
When Laura finishes her work on a page, she only needs to start a workflow and pick the corresponding template. The workflow status automatically changes to In Progress and coworkers receive a notification when they have a Pending Task (visible at the top right of the SmartEdit window). While being In Progress, a workflow also blocks unauthorized users from editing pages.
Let’s review the Page Translation and Approval workflow from the video from a birds-eye view:
Note
This may look complex, but imagine the effort and error-prone coordination of doing this communication all by yourself.
Now, with the big picture in mind, let's also see some examples of how workflow management might look on the SmartEdit UI for the roles cmseditor and cmsreviewer.
Let’s assume Laura in her role as cmseditor has just finished editing a page:
Workflow Tasks, the Inbox, and Announcements
When a page is in an active workflow, SmartEdit displays a workflow menu called Page Tasks. The menu consists of two tabs: Current and All. The Current tab displays the currently active task. The All tab displays all tasks in the currently active workflow and indicates their status. Of course, you can only execute a task in a workflow if you have the correct permissions and if you’re a member of the user group that the task is assigned to. SmartEdit notifies you of pending tasks in active workflows through announcements. SmartEdit indicates the number of tasks beside the Inbox. When you open the Inbox, SmartEdit displays the tasks. Even better, when you select a task, SmartEdit conveniently jumps to the page with the active workflow.