BlueCielo Meridian Enterprise Server 2018 Administrator's Guide
Configuring self service
The other topics in this chapter describe the manual process of importing documents back into a Meridian Enterprise vault that you have shared with external business partners. The manual process gives you maximum control and flexibility to handle almost any document exchange scenario. But Meridian Enterprise also supports a more automated process that allows your trusted and authorized business partners limited, self service access to your master documents. This process also gives you the control you need but requires very little time and effort on your part after the system is configured.
The following figure illustrates how this process works.
After you have configured the system, the self service process for partners proceeds as follows.
- Partners click Get Masters when viewing a project in Meridian Portal. They are shown a special view of the Meridian Explorer repository where they can browse documents and create a package for their use. If they have the Send packages permission in the repository, they can initiate the package export themselves and the package will be created in the destination that is specified in the export package job. If they do not have the permission, they can click Request, which will indicate to other Meridian Explorer users that the package requires approval before it is sent to the destination.
- Partners receive email notification that their package has been sent to the destination system. Partners download the package from the destination, extract the documents, and make the necessary revisions.
- Partners create import packages in Meridian Portal and upload their revisions to those packages. Meridian Enterprise Server imports the revisions to the vault using the parameters in the import profile that is associated with the Meridian Portal tenancy.
To configure the system for this process, perform the tasks listed in the following table. You can use the hyperlinks to jump to the corresponding topic in this guide for detailed help. If you have already done some of these tasks, you can jump ahead to the ones that you have not yet done. Depending on your business process, not all of these tasks may be needed.
| Completed | Task | Topic Reference |
|---|---|---|
|
o |
Read this manual completely to familiarize yourself with the system. |
|
|
o |
Create the Meridian Explorer repository to which to publish renditions of released documents. | Creating a Meridian Explorer repository |
|
o |
Configure the repository views to show only the documents and metadata that you want to be available to Meridian Explorer users. | Configuring a Meridian Explorer repository |
|
o |
Register the Meridian Enterprise vaults that contain the master documents that you want to synchronize to the Meridian Explorer repository. | Registering a Meridian Enterprise vault |
|
o |
For each source vault, specify the vault property that identifies projects. This property is the key that links documents between Meridian Enterprise and Meridian Portal. |
|
|
o |
Create and schedule a Configurable synchronization job to keep the Meridian Explorer repository up to date with changes made in the source vaults. | |
|
o |
Configure the connection from Meridian Enterprise Server to Meridian Portal. This connection will be used to export documents from the source vaults to the destination where partners can receive them. | Viewing and editing the connectivity settings |
|
o |
Create one or more Export Package jobs to specify what, how, and where to export documents for use by partners. Note If you create multiple job definitions, only the first definition will be used by the Send Out workflow transition in Meridian Enterprise. If the job definition has the Content to include option set to Current master, the job will fail if the master document does not reside in the Meridian Enterprise project. Tip You might want to create separate jobs with different options enabled for specific purposes. Some examples are listed in the following table. |
|
|
o |
Create an import profile to specify how to import document revisions submitted by partners. Note By default, new documents will be imported into the project folder that matches the Meridian Portal project. If you want to place the documents in a sub-folder for additional processing, we recommend that you customize the VBScript event DocGenericEvent_AfterNewDocument to either set a property that is a part of the Field-Path definition of the vault or to move the new document to the desired folder. |
Creating an import profile |
| o | Enable the Enable packages support option of the Meridian Enterprise source vaults to allow revisions to be imported. | Viewing and editing vault properties |
|
o |
Configure the connection between Meridian Portal and Meridian Enterprise Server. This connection will be used to import the revisions back into the source vaults. | Configuring the Meridian Enterprise Server connection |
|
o |
Invite the partners to become members of the relevant projects. | Adding people to projects |
| o | In Meridian Enterprise Configurator, implement the VBScript event ImportPackage_AfterReadProperties to assign the appropriate document numbers to new documents submitted in packages from external business partners. By default, the new documents will be assigned GUID values as temporary document numbers. | ImportPackage_AfterReadProperties event |
| Issue Reason | Purpose | Option | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
|
For As-Builting |
The contractor should merge the project updates into the master document. |
Content to include |
Current master |
|
Lock project copy |
Enabled |
||
|
Lock master to project |
Enabled |
||
|
Create project copy |
Enabled |
||
|
Package can be returned |
Enabled |
||
|
For Update |
The contractor should modify the documents as specified. |
Content to include |
Current project copy |
|
Lock project copy |
Enabled |
||
|
Lock master to project |
Disabled |
||
|
Create project copy |
Enabled |
||
|
Package can be returned |
Enabled |
||
|
For Information |
The contractor should use the content of the documents but not change them |
Content to include |
Current project copy |
|
Lock project copy |
Disabled |
||
|
Lock master to project |
Disabled |
||
|
Create project copy |
Disabled |
||
|
Package can be returned |
Disabled |