ActiveDocs Opus Template Maintenance

ActiveDocs Opus Designer is the comprehensive integrated design and management environment for ActiveDocs Opus Templates, created with Business Users in mind to minimize reliance on IT resources for Template Design and Management.

To support maintenance, Designer's Content Manager works easily with multiple collections (called Catalogs) of Template Sets, Templates, Snippets (common content), Data Views (for data source integration), and Design Item Sets (sets of Active Fields and Rules) - all reusable, and collectively known as Design Components.

Each Catalog represents Design Components stored on a particular ActiveDocs Opus Composition Server site. This means that Content Manager makes it easy to work with discrete Development, Quality Assurance, and Production servers. Content Manager's Export and Import functions manage the dependencies between Design Components to ensure that progressing your changes between the Development, QA, and Production environments is as painless as possible.

The optional Version Control module assists with maintenance by providing a controlled environment for managing change. Version Control also allows you to use time-and-date-based Deferred Publishing which means that you don't need to be working at 1a.m. to deploy a critical change.

Good design also helps the maintenance process. For example, taking advantage of Designer's building-block approach, common content can be stored in Snippets which are in turn linked to Templates. If the common content like Terms & Conditions needs to be changed, then it can be changed in the Snippet that contains it; the next time the Templates which link to the Snippet are used, the latest version of the Snippet gets used.