Team Solution Life Cycle

See Also

The typical development life cycle involves planning, developing, testing, and distribution. While the team solution follows this basic cycle, it provides flexibility in the development phase. There is no need to start each solution from scratch, thus saving development time and resources.

One of the most valuable features of Access Workflow Designer is the team template. Developers have the ability to take an existing solution-including the database schema, workflow design, permissions information, Web files, and offline replication settings-and save it as a template. Each team template contains all of the information necessary to create a complete instance of the team solution.

The obvious advantage of a team template is it can be saved as a file and opened on any server that has the Access Workflow Design server components installed. This makes your solutions easy to distribute.

Note   The team template also stores information about the configuration settings for the SQL Server on which it was created. When developing your templates, be sure to use the same server configuration as the server from which the template will be deployed.

Not only is distribution easier with team templates, but you can also use an existing template as a baseline for new solutions. First, you create a new team solution based on the template. Then, you modify that instance of the solution in any way you wish. Once the team solution has been modified, you save it as a new template that includes all of your changes. Then, this new template can be used to create new instances of the modified solution.

A typical life cycle of a team solution involves the following steps. You can begin the cycle with an existing template or by creating a new solution database.

1. Use the New Team Solutions wizard to select a team template from the template database. A template stores the information necessary to create an instance of a team solution, including the database and a Web site. For more information about using templates, see Creating Team Templates.
   
   
2. Create a solution based on the template. The New Team Solutions wizard creates an instance of the team solution and registers it in the modSystem database on the server. At this point, you can use the solution as-is or customize it as necessary. For details, see Creating a Team Solution Based on a Team Template.
   
   
3. Customize the solution using the Access Workflow Designer to work with different kinds of data, modify the workflow processes to implement different workflow rules, modify the offline publications to define different sets of data available for offline use, and modify the permissions row security and workflow. For details about the steps involved in adding these features to a solution, see Developing a Team Solution.
   
   
4. Modify the team Web pages to customize the user interface. The Web pages can be customized using Microsoft FrontPage®, Access, Microsoft Visual InterDev™, and so on. For more information about requirements for the user interface, see Developing the Solution User Interface.
   
   
5. Once the solution has been customized, if you want to be able to create new solutions based on this design, you can create a new team template from the modified solution. This new template stores the information required to create a new instance of the modified solution, including its database and Web site.

An example of the team solution development life cycle

Where you enter the life cycle depends on how you plan to develop your solution. The typical life cycle assumes you use the available template and modify it to suit your requirements. For information about planning, see Planning a Team Solution.

If you plan to start with an existing database instead of with a template, the process requires a little more work on the development side. For more information, see Creating and Registering Solution Databases.