Configure a Quarantine Area for new assets
This article describes how you can easily configure a Quarantine Area for your project. Quarantine Area is useful to verify if any new assets have all necessary qualities – metadata, relations etc. and/or comply with your internal policies or other requirements.
It can be useful for only a subset of users to have access to the unverified assets. When assets are verified, they will be made visible to a bigger group of users or all users.
Setting up the Quarantine Area
You can configure the Quarantine Area in various ways.
These instructions are based on the core, out-of-the-box censhare functionality. What we call a Quarantine Area, is not a special feature. Therefore, the same result can be achieved using different approaches. We mention two of such and provide detailed instructions for one of them: using domains. You can configure your own quarantine area using an alternative approach.
Please make sure that this (or your own) configuration only affects assets that you really want to have in the Quarantine area. Otherwise, you may unintentionally catch assets that should not be quarantined, e.g., those created or transformed by an automation or a third-party integration.
Using domains
You can determine accessibility of the assets in the Quarantine by using a separate domain for it and giving a subset of users an access to this domain.
You can create a Quarantine domain in the Admin Client -> Master data -> 1st Domains (you can also use 2nd Domains if you prefer to separate the quarantine assets by adding an additional domain complexity). You can add a new domain as a part of a tree. Be mindful of the correct access level: if users have access to a higher level domain, they’ll have access to all lower levels of a given domain.
As an example you might want to have root.brand.assets. and root.brand.quarantine. domains, which are part of a given brand. In your structure, the assets. domain could be used for the ready-to-use assets and the quarantine. domain could be used for the assets that need verification.
Using asset ownership
You can determine accessibility of the assets in the Quarantine by keeping the assets on the same domain as other assets, but limiting their visibility using asset ownership. For this:
Create a new user group in Admin Client -> Master data -> User groups for the subset of users who should have access to the assets in the Quarantine (or you can choose to use an already existing user group for that)
Add users to this user group
Additional: Custom features
You can also create a custom feature that’s going to determine if an asset is in the Quarantine and use it to filter out the correct assets, however that won’t prevent visibility of the assets (without further automations).
You can combine it with access rights ownership or domains with an automated action, for example, if a given custom feature is set, automation should either add correct owners or move an asset to a given domain.
Workflow
You might want to add a step in your Workflow for the Quarantine assets, e.g. called Quarantine which will help you with identifying assets that need to be reviewed, and you can always use this step in the automations.
You can configure Workflows in the Admin Client -> Master data -> Workflows. If you need an additional Workflow state, you can add a new one in the Admin Client -> Master data -> Workflow states.
Moving assets into the Quarantine Area
For moving assets into the quarantine area, it seems reasonable to set up an automation so that they are processed immediately.
Using asset automation and domains
To automatically move uploaded and/or imported assets into the Quarantine Area you can use a standard censhare server action (automatic).
Go to Admin Client -> Configuration -> Modules -> Libraries -> Asset automation Sample (automatic)
You can set a trigger based on your specific use case, for example, Asset event - Create assets when asset is created, the action should be triggered
In Asset filters you want to filter out your assets.
You might want to limit asset types on which this action should be triggered, e.g. to only images and videos
You might want to limit domains on which this action is triggered, e.g. if user’s main domain is root.brand.assets. and that’s where they upload the files by default, add this domain to the automation
You might want to add any additional metadata to identify assets which should be moved to your Quarantine Area
In the Asset Update section select Update asset afterwards. Select how you want your assets to be updated, e.g. you want your asset to be in a specific workflow, on a specific domain, have a specific feature
If your feature is not available as a filter criteria in the list, and/or your configuration requires some XML code, you can turn on the Admin Mode on the Client and select from the menu Admin -> Show/edit XML file to add conditions there.
Save and refresh server configuration (remember to refresh remote servers if you have any to make sure the code is synced)
Add your customisations to the code repository (e.g. GitLab) to follow the correct deployment process
Alternatives
You can use Asset attributes module instead of Libraries module. The steps are similar.
Instead of changing the domain of new assets, you can set the automation to catch new assets that are owned by a certain group and pass the ownership to another group that is entitled to verify new assets.
Moving assets out of the Quarantine Area
Using asset automation and domains
To automatically move ready assets from the Quarantine Area you can use a standard censhare server action (automatic). This automation will still require some manual action from the user that serves as a trigger for such automation.
Go Admin Client -> Configuration -> Modules -> Libraries -> Asset automation Sample (automatic)
You can set a trigger based on your use case, for example, Asset events -> Asset Workflow changed
In Asset filters you want to filter out your assets on which the server action should be triggered
In the Asset Update section select Update asset afterwards
Select how you want your assets to be updated, e.g. you want your assets to be in a specific workflow, on a specific domain, or have a specific feature
If your feature is not available as a filter criteria in the list, and/or your configuration requires some XML code, you can turn on the Admin Mode on the Client and select from the menu Admin -> Show/edit XML file to add conditions there.
Save and refresh server configuration (remember to refresh remote servers if you have any to make sure the code is synced)
Add your customisations to the code repository (e.g. GitLab) to follow the correct deployment process
Alternatives
You can use Asset attributes module instead of Libraries module. The steps are similar.
To manually move assets from the Quarantine Area you can either do it one by one or in bulk by adjusting whatever makes your assets being in a Quarantine in the Web or Java Client (i.e., changing the workflow step, changing the feature value, or changing the access rights directly).
Web Client enhancements
You might want to consider making the journey for the users as user friendly as possible and make sure the users can find the quarantined assets quickly. We suggest the following options. You can combine some of them indeed.
Set up a Stored Search with parameters that are identifying your assets that are in quarantine, e.g. all assets on the domain root.brand.quarantine. and share it with users or user groups who should have access to it.
Set up a new page providing an overview of all assets in the Quarantine and add it to the left-hand side navigation on your workspace.
Add a Quality gate with Completeness checks. Make sure users understand which missing information that they need to add to the assets before they can be used by other users.
Make it user friendly for users to approve/accept assets once the information has been added, e.g. by having a Workflow widget in the workspace, or adding an CtA button that will move the asset into the correct workflow step (or whatever is your trigger for the automated action).
Make it user friendly for users to edit assets in bulk. For this, you might want to add a server action available for the multi edit or use a standard censhare editing properties actions, depending what you want to enhance, and how you setup your workflow (automated or not).
Additional considerations
Global asset distribution
If you’re using the domain structure suggestion, make sure that if your assets are added and distributed across many regions globally, e.g. Asia and Europe, your system is setup correctly to distribute those assets and move them without a delay between domains.
File upload in the Web Client
When users upload the files using the Web Client and those assets are subject to quarantine, the users should make sure that the upload progress notification on the top right turns green. This will make sure the assets have been uploaded successfully. Unfortunately, for now there is no other way for the user to check if the upload was successful or not.