An Introduction to Staging

The range of functions provided to and by Staging enables one to create Environments in which customers are able to test and develop in the safety of non-productive Environments. This includes the whole gamut of troubleshooting, error reproduction and pretesting any change requests for project extensions in existing systems.
Before one can begin explaining the different configuration aspects via the Staging process, one must first reach a common understanding of the terminology being used in this context. Although several of these terms have been explained in previous sections, those attempting the Staging process should revisit these terms and definitions before proceeding. The terms relevant to the process have been listed and defined below.

Term	Definition
System	A system is a set of functionalities and components provided by different products that can be configured and designed according to customer requirements.
Staging Environments	Multiple Staging Environments can be generated for a single system, with each of the Environments having the same functional configuration as the others in the system. However, certain aspects such endpoints may differ (so as to separate them from the productive Environment).
Merging	In order for a user to synchronize data from one particular Staging area to another it is necessary to copy the data store from one Environment to the other. Although this process is generally accepted as Staging, the technical background process in the GIT data store distinguishes this as merging. ConfigPortal guides the user through this process by providing a streamlined UI. The purpose behind merging, is to deliver the intended functional configuration changes made in the offline repository into the online repository after executing the Staging wizard. Please note that different Environments will have different parameters related to the
Activation	Users are able to activate or deactivate different configuration groups. This implies that a configuration is turned on or off in the system. After the process of merging an offline repository into the online repository, the user is required to manually activate the configurations in the system. ConfigPortal stores the configuration data across all defined Staging Environments in its data store. Due to the fact that different users are expected to work in different Staging Environments, the users must synchronize the data frequently. ConfigPortal provides a streamlined UI that simplifies this task. ConfigPortal also ensures that the complete difference in configuration data (from offline to the online repository) is synchronized during the merging process. Please note that in order to avoid inconsistencies in the data model, the user is not able to synchronize configuration subsets. However, users are able to activate/deactivate different Concrete Use Case Pages after the data synchronization.