Ensembling Help – Workflow: about the project lifecycle

Workflow: about the project lifecycle

work flow sequence life cycle lifecycle

A project progresses through various stages. This is the workflow or project lifecycle.

Everyone will have different workflows depending on project requirements. There is, though, a basic model which Ensembling offers.

Not an editor

Ensembling isn't an editing tool. You continue to use whichever are the most appropriate tools for the job, tools you already own. Colleagues may use different tools: one might use Microsoft Word and another OpenOffice to open the same document.

Source materials

There's loosely four kinds of material:

a clean slate: no draft documents have yet been produced, but you'd like to invite suggestions (for example, when compiling an agenda, preparing a shopping list or asking for ideas for a course syllabus). We call this brainstorming.
supporting materials: there may be information which informs the final piece but isn't part of it. For example, you may be composing a letter in reply to some article or letter. You may want to put this alongside the developing reply. Indeed people may want to comment on this original before the reply even gets started, for example to point out how particular suggestions should be responded to.
source materials: these files are edited to produce revisions. Sometimes these are commented on directly (Word documents or JPEG images for example) but other times, though you can store any kind of file, Ensembling can't produce a picture of the pages for you, so you just see a place holder. In this case you'll also need…
secondary materials: you can almost always produce a PDF file or in some cases an image or images from the source which can be used to make comments. It can be helpful if both are stored so everything is on one place, but comments can be made on the secondary file and the comments incorporated into the source and another secondary file created.

The distinctions are a bit gray, however. Sometimes you'd work on a Word document until ready and then produce a PDF as the finished piece.

A typical workflow

A new publication is started by creating a project folder or a folder within an existing project project. Placeholder folders and documents could also be created at this point anticipating the structure of the piece.
If the content is not defined at a pre-draft stage, you can invite contributions on what should be included. This is a brainstorming document, a near-blank page or template where suggestions can be placed collectively.
Supporting materials, if any, are uploaded as a document. Colleagues review these and make comments to inform the first draft.
Or invitations for people not participating int he project can be sent to submit files via a public URL or by email. This is a dead letterbox.

Someone writes a first draft and uploads it to a new document or one of the placeholder documents prepared earlier, and invites comments.

Colleagues mark up the draft with their comments.

Pictures and diagrams to go into the final piece are also collected (as documents). At this stage they may not be embedded in the text, especially as the text and pictures may go forward to be combined using a page layout program.

A sub-editor (possibly the same person as the contributor) reviews the comments and decides which to accept and which to reject. Because comments can be marked with various such statuses, just as the editor can review the comments in a logical order, so the author can incorporate the accepted changes by scanning through the comments.

The author (or someone else) then uses

edit

to retrieve the first draft and incorporates the accepted comments into it. They then upload the second draft using

supersede

Comments are invited on this next draft, and so on until whoever's job it is to decide is happy with the result.

That may be the final publications, but in the case of a book or magazine it is more likely that these materials will then be incorporated into a page layout or web site. The composited document would then be presented for review and comment in the same way, and drafts produced until satisfactory.

Completion can be indicated approving the final piece.

If the piece needs to be printed, the file can be published for collection.