SAP (thankfully) made some changes to the way (cloud) Producer behaves when you access it for the first time (as a new Author who has never accessed the Workarea). These changes do a much better job of walking you through what you need to do to set up your Workarea, and take some of the mystery and confusion out of it. In this post I look at the steps you’ll need to carry out.
As of the 21.11 release if SAP Enable Now, when you access Producer for a Workarea for the first time, you will immediately be presented with the following message:
Click Yes. (Always.) This is the same as going to menu option Workarea > Check Out Objects, and will allow you to choose the objects you want to synchronize between your local Producer and the central Manager. The following dialog box is displayed:
In the Checkout dialog box, select the checkbox to the left of all Groups you want to synchronize. For a new Workarea, where there isn’t much existing content, you can just select Root. For established Workareas that contain a lot of content – not all of which you personally will need to work with – expand the hierarchy, and select at the lowest level the Groups (or even individual objects) that you want to be copied to your local Producer. Make sure Root is always selected, even if you don’t select all of its contents.
In a useful improvement, if you select a sub-Group, SAP Enable Now will automatically select its immediate parent (only, and not everything under it – this is the same as you Ctrl-clicking on the parent node) – and its parents, all the way up to Root. This will prevent checked-out Groups/objects from being placed in Unsorted because Producer doesn’t know where to put them because you forgot to check out their parent(s).
For more information on selective synchronization, see this video, starting at 5:15.
Once you’ve selected the required Groups, click Ok and the following dialog box will be displayed (always):
The Overwrite local objects? dialog box is asking if you want to replace any local version of the Resources (files SAP Enable Now needs to be able to operate) with versions from the server. If this is your first access you won’t have any local resources, so just click Overwrite (always).
SAP Enable Now will then retrieve all of the selected objects – along with all Resources, and any other content objects or Groups flagged as ‘Must Have‘ – from the server (the Manager) and copy these to your local Producer (technically, to your C: drive). As it does so (which could take several minutes – or even hours for very large Workareas over a narrow Internet connection) its progress will be shown, as follows:
Once all selected/applicable objects have been downloaded, the following dialog box will be displayed:
This message is saying that you have downloaded the ‘root’ (the highest-level element) of the object hierarchy on the server, and is asking if you want to make this the ‘root’ of your local Producer hierarchy. Which you do. So click Yes. Always. It is important that you synchronize the Root, and have this the same in your local Workarea, so SAP Enable Now knows where to put additional content objects (otherwise they will be placed in Unsorted, as noted above, which is confusing). Technically you could select any Group as the local Root, but this is a deprecated feature from before you could selectively synchronize (sub-)Groups, so there is no point in doing it.
And that’s all there is to it! It is actually exactly the same steps as prior to the 21.11 release, but now you are automatically prompted (in Step 1) to select objects to synchronize, instead of having to work this out yourself.
