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One of the hardest parts of successfully supporting analytics stakeholders is communicating the status of your assets. You have to effectively differentiate between ones that are current, ones that are out of date, and ones that are under active development and not yet ready for use. With lifecycle statuses in Workstream, you can easily provide this visibility.
What are the lifecycle statuses?
Workstream supports 4 asset lifecycle statuses:
In Development: the asset is still being worked on and may be incomplete or not yet fully viable
Active: the asset is up to date and ready for use
Expiring: the data team is in the process of sunsetting the asset (either manually or automatically). In most cases it is still usable, but it will be archived soon
Archived: the asset is archived and no longer in use
As you maintain asset statuses, keep in mind that the asset's visibility is in most cases determined by its certification status rather than its lifecycle status. Users with member permissions can see assets that are certified, that are shared with them in a collection, and that they have viewed natively in their BI tool while using the Concierge. This is true regardless of status—for example, if an asset is in development but is certified, a stakeholder with member permissions will still be able to view it within Workstream, even before it becomes active.
Where can I set lifecycle statuses?
Lifecycle statuses can be updated by workspace owners pretty much anywhere you interact with the asset.
Statuses can be updated from the asset details page:
From the grid and list views throughout the knowledge repository:
As well as when viewing the asset natively, using the Concierge:
Statuses are synced immediately across all locations for anyone viewing the asset.
Automatic asset expiration
To save your team time, rather than only supporting manual management of asset expiration, Workstream allows you to set automatic timelines for when assets expire. Owners can set this under the workspace settings, available by clicking on the workspace name in the top left corner of the page, navigating to "Settings", then heading to "Asset lifecycle".
Automatic expiration can be toggled on or off at a global level. Below that, you have the option to set how many views prevent the asset from automatically expiring. Only views that occur within the Workstream web app or with the Concierge installed will be counted toward this total. For this reason, we recommend waiting to enable automatic expiration until after you have rolled out Workstream to your stakeholders.
You can then set how many days must elapse before the assets starts expiring, and how many days there are between an asset being marked as "expiring," and the asset being archived. Updates to these settings are saved automatically as soon as you make a change.
Only assets that currently have a status of active will trigger the automatic expiration process. Assets that are in development are not subject to automatic expiration.
You can always manually change the status of an expiring asset, but keep in mind that once the asset is archived, it will be hidden from all views that do not specifically filter for archived assets. To reactivate an expired/archived asset, navigate to the archived assets view, and update its status.
It can also be reactivated from the asset details page.