The 3 Standard Sites

There are 3 standard sites that are supplied in each Process Library. These are:

• Sandpit
• Prelive
• Live

There are some important consequences of using these sites which have varied slightly over time.

Purpose of the Sandpit Site

The Sandpit site is there to enable authors to experiment, draft, publish and basically play around with ideas for their process mapping. It is there to assess and work with individual process maps rather than with full end-to-end flows created by many authors. This is very important to understand, especially when working with Approvals.

The Sandpit site should never be thought of as a site to send end users to. The Sandpit site is not intended to be a work-in-progress version of the Live site. Authors can delete their documents at will from the Sandpit site, or change their processes in ways that completely break end-to-end connectivity. No assumptions can be made about the content or structure of processes in the Sandpit site, or even the presence of maps that may have previously been there.

The Sandpit exists simply to enable authors to edit and view their individual maps in the HTML environment before submitting them for approval.

NOTE: Maps that are submitted for approval in the Sandpit are either locked for editing or removed from the Sandpit (depending upon your configuration). They are only made available in the Sandpit once the Approval process has completed. This is done to prevent authors editing maps that are being approved, and to avoid locking complications that would otherwise arise when the Sandpit map needs to be updated with the latest approved version.

The Sandpit site will display a disclaimer at the top:

Purpose of the Prelive Site

The Prelive Site is the work in progress version of the Live site. Following a Prelive Publish, the Prelive site appears as it would do if all the maps pending approval had been approved. It exists to enable maps to be approved before they go live in the context of all the other maps that have been or are being approved.

Maps are not deleted from the Prelive site by the Triaster software, so whereas in the Sandpit site off-page connectors may appear and disappear, they remain constant in the Prelive site.

Maps should never be directly edited in the Prelive site. They should only ever be accepted/rejected for approval in the Prelive site, and then edited as required in the Sandpit site.

The Prelive site will display a disclaimer at the top:

Purpose of the Live Site

The Live site exists to be used by the staff of the organisation as the approved set of processes. It should never be directly edited, and Triaster software never deletes maps from the Live site.

There is no disclaimer at the top.

Important Consequences of this Model

Map Deletion

If a process author wishes to permanently delete a process map, it must be done in the Map Stores of all 3 sites.

Approvals

If your configuration is set to remove a map from the Sandpit when it has been submitted for Approval, any maps that link to it (via off-page connectors or manual hyperlinks) in the Sandpit site will have broken hyperlinks while the approval process is underway. Once the map is approved, it is copied back into the Sandpit site (overwriting any map that may have been put there in the meantime).

However, an approved map cannot be copied back to the Sandpit if a file with the same name is open for edit at the time the copy is attempted. This is always going to create an error condition, the only remedy being a later manual copy of the file from the Live map store to the Sandpit map store.