About work areas

Work areas are compartments within a vault that are separate from the Main area of the vault. A work area can be useful for containing all of the documents under revision for a specific project, workgroup, department, or other purpose when one or more of the following applies:

• Access to the documents should be temporarily granted to specific groups of users.
• Revision of the documents should be isolated from and invisible in the Main area of the vault.
• The documents as a group should follow a workflow process, such as the phases of a project.

Work areas function similarly to a vault in that they can be configured with their own:

• History retention
• Work Isolation Mode
• Initial imported document status

And they function similarly to a workflow definition in that each work area can have its own workflow. 

Similar to documents, which are created from document templates, work areas are created from work area templates. Documents are revised in a work area by first assigning documents that reside in the Main area to a work area. This locks the documents in the Main area against further changes. Referenced documents can also appear in the work area but cannot be changed unless they too are assigned to the work area.

The workflow of a work area controls the change of the documents contained in the work area as a set. This can be useful to model a project’s progress through different phases that each require specific actions to be performed with the entire set of documents. Once assigned to a work area, each document may go through its own workflow (working copies, document type workflow, or workflow definition) during which changes to the document are made. Optionally, work areas may also contain other work areas called subwork areas. These can be useful to further break down large projects into more manageable subprojects.

Each work area workflow transition may not occur unless all of the documents in the work area are in the Released state of their own workflow. This ensures that the documents are in a stable state when the work area proceeds to its next phase. When the changes to the documents are completed, the changed documents along with new documents created in the work area can be released to the Main area (or parent work area) where they become the latest revisions. Individual documents may be released from the work area to the Main area as necessary, or they may follow the entire work area workflow and be released as a set.

Users can be granted security access to a work area that is the same or different from their access to the Main area. Users who should not see or work on the documents can be denied access to the work area.

Note    Work areas are not supported by some of the newer features of Meridian Enterprise such as scopes, renditions, email notifications, and so on. An alternative to work areas is the Meridian Advanced Project Workflow Module. Besides the features described in Understanding the BlueCielo Meridian Advanced Project Workflow Module, it has the following advantages over using work areas.

Creating and configuring work area templates are described in the following topics.