Workspaces App Guide

Overview

Ecrion Workspaces enables access to files, jobs and other building blocks of your workflow in an organization.

Using Workspaces, you easily can store files, jobs and even documents produced by other Ecrion apps (e.g. a contract, a letter, a claim, etc.). The app allows you to better organize your assets into meaningful categories, e.g. per department. You can also assign different permissions to workspaces so that certain users or groups will only see the workspaces you allow them to see.

With Ecrion Workspaces, organizations can keep all their activity assets, such as jobs, schedules, triggers and documents in one place.

This guide covers all the information you might need while using Workspaces. For a detailed understanding of the capabilities in the Workspaces App, please skim over the functionalities detailed within this guide.

Getting Started

Ecrion Workspaces helps organizations in their efforts to keep together all activity assets as a top-level folder, increasing efficiency and ensuring accuracy. If you’re ready to take workspaces experience to the next level, follow the instructions in this section to find out more.

Installing the App

Follow the steps below to learn how to install the app.

Note

If the user does not have the corresponding App keys installed, after the installation, you will be automatically redirected to install the licenses. To continue with this, select Manage Licenses, then click the Add button to install the product keys. For more information on Licenses Management, please access the following link: Ecrion Accounts Guide.

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Requesting a Demo

Follow the steps below to learn how to request a demo of the app.

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Workspaces Interface

This section provides a detailed tour of the most common components that add interactivity to the Workspaces Interface. Find below the touchpoints for the users as they navigate throughout the app and learn how to make full use of them.

(A) Navigation Bar - appears at the top of the app screen and it is split into 3 sections - left, center and right.

(B) Toolbar - displays the main view of the application you are currently working with.

(C) Workspaces View - is the dedicated region that you will use to easily navigate through your workspaces defined in your organization and find the associated information, such as the name of the workspace, its activity and its description.

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Workspaces App Basics

During the software installation, a Default workspace is added to the organization. It is used to store all the projects content that you have created or worked under different Ecrion Apps.

Workspace names should be meaningful and scoped to a specific group of users. If you are working on exclusive independent scopes of projects, multiple workspaces could make sense. The name must not contain special characters, but can include spaces. For example, Front Office, Operations, Bank Office, QA, Development, Production Projects, etc.

Workspace Management

The purpose of a workspace is to allow you to better organize your assets into meaningful categories and can also provide restricted access, so that certain users or groups will only see the workspaces you allow them to see.

Creating Workspaces

Follow the steps below to learn how to create a new workspace.

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Searching Workspaces

Follow the steps below to learn how to search through existing workspaces within your organization.

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Managing Workspaces

Managing a workspace involves setting up multiple configurations at workspace level and its tasks users are authorized to work with (Review and Approval, Publish, etc.). Follow the steps below to learn how to configure a workspace.

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Deleting Workspaces

Follow the steps below to learn how to remove a workspace from the list.

Note

It is important to know that deleting a workspace is an irreversible operation. Make sure you have created a backup copy of any files you may need before deleting the workspace.

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Viewing User Permissions

User permissions allow you to see and manage which users have which permissions at workspace level. Follow the steps below to learn how to see privileges that authorize a user.

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Users Permissions can be enabled from the Users Settings chapter.

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Workspace Assets

Workspaces enable collaboration and storage of all assets involved in your customer communication management processes. These are logical divisions of environments, usually associated with departments within a company. All the files needed for document production have to be stored in workspaces.

Workspace is the place where all project assets are stored, but a user cannot make the precise difference between communications or folders until opening them.

In this section you will find about each type of these assets. For more details, select a component from the table below.

Files Jobs Schedules Triggers

Accessing Workspace Assets

By selecting any workspace in the list, you can explore all the files and project folders within that workspace. If you want to access other specific assets (Jobs, Schedules or Triggers), you can click directly on the components available in the Activity column.

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Files

You can select a workspace from the workspaces list, at any time, to access its files. The Files page allows you to view and organize all the files and folders stored within. The view provides a hierarchical structure that allows you to keep your documents organized.

Adding New Files

Follow the steps below to learn how to insert an asset to your workspace.

Note

Prior of adding a new file to your workspace, make sure you select a root folder first. If there are no existing folders, select the +New Folder button in the toolbar to create one. For more details on how to create a folder, please visit the Adding New Folders section of the same guide.

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Document Templates

Document Templates are .epr files created within the Ecrion Publisher, a stand-alone Ecrion solution, or by using the Online Template Editor, integrated with the Workspaces app. They describe the visual look & feel as well as the business rules that apply when producing a document dynamically from data.

Email Templates

To send your correspondence as an attachment to an email, you will need to create an email template. Ecrion provides an easy way to create email templates and multiple options that allow you to customize and format your emails' content. Email Templates are the .ehtml files and can be edited through the Email Editor.

Content Fragments

Content Fragments are .epb files created either through the Ecrion Publisher, or by using the Online Template Editor. Fragments are a powerful way to improve efficiency and consistency across your document templates. For any of your designed content, you can preserve your work in a content fragment. By doing so, you can insert it into other templates. This means that you do not have to recreate the section of content that you had already created, but perhaps more importantly, when you need to change something within that section of content you will only need to change in one location and consequentially all of your templates using this content fragment are updated.

Workflows

Workflows are the .wk4 files, which define a series of processing steps or transformations that your data will go through, ultimately resulting in a document or set of documents being published along one or more output channels, like print, email or SMS. To build or customize a workflow, you will need to access the Workflow Editor.

Business Rules

Business behavior is governed by business rules that dictate how flows should be initiated and directed. They typically describe requirements or policies that transcend the software project they are required in the domain or business and the workflows may need to conform to them. The main utility of business rules is that these can be used when there is a set of common rules shared within workflows or in case of the conditional translation. An example of such a rule could be conditional translation.

Forms

Ecrion allows you to create forms that capture data or enables users to create documents interactively. A form is a window or a screen that contains numerous fields or spaces to enter data. Each field holds a field label so that any user who views the form gets an idea of its contents. Forms are the .efd files, which can be build or customized through the Form Editor.

Sorting Files

Starting from the Files page, you can sort the entities listed within by using the available column-headers, such as Name, Author, Size or Date Modified.

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Filtering Files

Starting from the Files page, you can filter the entities listed within.

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Contextual Files Options

Follow the steps below to explore the options from the contextual menu of a file.

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Configuring Tags

Tags are keywords associated with a folder or file from a workspace. These can be added manually and are useful when you want to find the needed content in a quick manner. Follow the steps below to learn how to add a new tag to a file/folder.

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Configuring Versions

As you work with any of the projects you create in different Ecrion Apps, you may modify files and upload newer versions. The Ecrion Workspaces will use a repository to store the file in its previous state and use the new file as the latest version. This process is called versioning and will prove useful to you for tracking and accessing the history of any file within your workspace.

This functionality gives you some benefits such as:

Follow the steps below to learn how to configure versions of a file.

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Along with each version, you can find useful information regarding the following:

Version The unique identifier for the current version.
Date Created The date when the version was created.
Size The size of the current version.
Author The author that created the version
Comments Comments associated with the version.
Status The status of the current version.

New versions of a file are created as a result of any action that creates or overwrites that file, for example:


Adding or Removing Favorites

Follow the steps below to learn how to add/remove a file/folder to/from Favorites.

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Note

Notice that the favorite files will be displayed in the Files page if you choose Favorites from the sidebar menu.

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Sharing Files

Besides folders, Workspaces also allows you to share each file, separately. To share a file within a workspace, follow the steps from below.

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Exploring File Dependencies

Whenever you set up a project within Workspaces, you will need many different types of files to be able to generate the needed documents. The Workspaces app rarely works in isolations. Each project relies on multiple individual and reusable components.

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Folders

Folders provide containers that help you organize and store your production documents. Within a workspace, you can add as many folders as you want.

The top-level folder created in a workspace, is usually called a root folder or a project folder and it is used to hold all the files for a custom project you are working on. For example, it could be the name of the document you are producing. Each workspace can contain multiple root folders, but at least one is necessary in order to add your files. It can contain multiple different files, including templates, content fragments, business rules, workflows or other folders.

It would be desirable to achieve consensus on folder naming within a team or a department. You should keep the folder names short, but meaningful. The names must not contain special characters, but can include spaces. For example, Contract, Credit Order Letter, Loan Agreement, On-Boarding Package, Portfolio Analysis, Monthly Statement, etc.


Adding New Folders

Follow the steps below to learn how to create a folder to your workspace.

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Folder Content

In order to add a file or a folder to any project or another ordinary folder in Workspaces, you will need to understand how to use the Upload feature. This is often the first step in getting started with setting up your document production projects, but this task will also prove to be necessary as you continue to add modifications to templates, add new data sources and much more.


Uploading Single Files

Follow the steps below to learn how to upload a single file in a folder from your workspace.

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Uploading ZIP Files

Follow the steps below to learn how to upload a ZIP file in a folder from your workspace.

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Sharing Folders across Multiple Workspaces

Shared folders are useful to improve efficiency and consistency of your documents and also these are great for organizations that want to preserve disk space. For example, you can create a shared folder called Branding, containing the company logo and some common stylesheets. Then, these files can be used by a large number of users, from different workspaces, without having to add a version of your file each time is needed.

Note

Only root folders can become shared; if you are not able to see this option within the contextual menu of folders in the sidebar, use the upper menu bar to return to the main folder.

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Follow the steps below to learn how to share a folder across the other workspaces of your organization.

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Your root-folder, together with all its assets, is now shared across all the workspaces created in the current organization. To verify, access another workspace and notice that the folder you just shared is visible from the other one.

You can identify if a folder is shared or not through its tags. Once a folder is shared, the Shared ( ) tag will be visible after access, next to its name.

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To stop sharing a folder, right-click on it within Sidebar and select the Share\Unshare option from the contextual menu and. Then, select Unshare to confirm the folder.

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Creating Hidden Folders

In the Workspaces app, you can tag a folder as hidden folder. Once a folder is hidden, it will not be shown to users unless a user has specifically chosen to view hidden folders in their user profiles. Hidden folders are useful when you want to add content that you or any other user should not modify or for old folders with whom you don't want to clutter the interface by default. However, hidden folders will still be indexed by Ecrion.

Follow the steps below to learn how to create a hidden folder.

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Displaying Hidden Folders

Note

This feature is available only through Admin app. Therefore, you must have installed Ecrion Admin.

Follow the steps below to learn how to display hidden folders in your workspaces.

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Contextual Folders Options

Follow the steps below to explore the options from the contextual menu of a folder.

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Setting Folder Permissions

Follow the steps below to learn how to configure folder's permissions for users/groups in your organization.

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Synchronizing Folders

Note

A reachable Amazon S3 connection is required in order to set up a synchronized folder in Ecrion Platform. To create a new connection, please visit the Amazon S3 connections from the Ecrion Admin app's documentation.

Follow the steps below to learn how to configure a folder to synchronize with the Amazon Web Service.

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Importing Workspaces

Workspaces provides the ability to import external folder archives to the Workspace and use their assets. Only ZIP archives can be imported. Follow the steps below to learn how to import a workspace to your organization.

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Exporting Workspaces

Follow the steps below to learn how to export a workspace of your organization.

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Jobs

In Ecrion Workspaces, we use the term job to refer to a communication workflow that is executing or has finished executing. There are some key distinctions between a workflow at design time and a workflow at runtime (i.e. a job).

Because you can run the same workflow multiple times, each job will be assigned its own unique identifier called the Job ID. You can find it under the URL of the Job Details page.

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Each job can have multiple statuses:

Each job creates a corresponding folder for its outputs within the Jobs page. Within that folder, each step also creates its own subfolder to store its outputs, if any. Each step, as it executes, will use the outputs from the previous step as its input. There is one exception to this rule: if the previous step is of a type which does not by its nature produce any output within a project's workflow (e.g. Copy to FTP), then it will simply be ignored and the step before it will be used instead.

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Sorting Jobs

Starting from the Jobs page, you can sort the entities listed within by using the available column-headers, such as Job Name, User Name, Start Date, End Date, Duration or Status.

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Accessing Job Details

Follow the steps below to learn how to access the detailed view of a job.

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Contextual Jobs Options

Follow the steps below to explore the options from the contextual menu of a job.

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Schedules

As well as for communications, environment administrators have the ability to configure the Workspaces app to start specific workflows at a certain time. The workflow jobs can be scheduled to run hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or every number of minutes, on certain days of the week, several times a month, etc.

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Creating New Schedules

Follow the steps below to learn how to create a new schedule for a specific workflow in the organization.

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Editing Schedules

Follow the steps below to learn how to edit an existing schedule.

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Viewing Schedule Log

Follow the steps below to learn how to access the log page of a schedule.

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Triggers

From Triggers, you can configure Ecrion Workspaces to start specific jobs as an automatic response to an action. Currently, the supported methods for triggering jobs are Hot Folders and Microsoft Message Queues (MSMQ).

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Creating New Triggers

In Workspaces, the supported methods for triggering workflows are Hot Folders and Microsoft Message Queues (MSMQ).


Configuring Hot Folders

A hot folder trigger monitors a specific folder looking for a user configured file pattern, e.g. all files matching "*.XML". Each time a file matching the pattern is dropped into the folder, Ecrion picks it up, removes it from the folder and runs a workflow using it as input.

The following parameters need to be configured:

Path Provide the path of the folder.
Hot Folder Type Select the Hot Folder type; Machine Physical Folder, SFTP Folder.
SFTP Connections If the Hot Folder type will be an SFTP Folder, select the connection to use. To learn how to create a new connection visit SFTP.
File Pattern Provide the file pattern of the data source file that Ecrion should be monitoring the folder for. You can use wild cards like ' * ' to make the pattern more generic.
Workflow Select the Choose File button and navigate for the workflow that should be run when a file is found.
Pooling Interval The number of seconds between 2 consecutive attempts to check for new files.
Configure Parameters Configure the parameters (if any) from the workflow that need to be set before it runs.

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Configuring Microsoft Message Queues

An MSMQ Trigger monitors the Microsoft Message Queue. Each time an entry is added, the Workspaces app will parse it using either a binary or XML formatter and use the result as the input. The formatter to use is specified by the user when creating or editing the trigger.

The following parameters need to be configured:

Path Provide the path of the MSMQ.
Formatter Type Choose the Formatter Type to be used; BinaryFormatter, XmlFormatter.
Workflow Select the Choose File button and navigate for the workflow that should be run when a file is found.
Pooling Interval The number of seconds between 2 consecutive attempts to check for new files.
Configure Parameters Configure the parameters (if any) from the workflow that need to be set before it runs.

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Contextual Triggers Options

Follow the steps below to explore the options from the contextual menu of a trigger.

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Viewing Trigger Options

Follow the steps below to learn how to access the log page of a trigger.

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