Enforcing a review and approval process is a common use of a Design/Change-Time policy. To create this type of policy, you include one of CentraSite's approval actions in the policy. An approval action identifies the group of users (the approver group) whose approval is required in order to complete the policy successfully. When you configure an approval policy, you can specify whether approval is required from just one approver in the group or from all approvers in the group.

You apply approval polices to PreStateChange events. Thus, to use approval policies on assets, those assets must be under lifecycle management.

When CentraSite executes an approval policy, it initiates an approval workflow. Users who are designated approvers review the request on the Pending Approvals tab of their Inbox page in CentraSite Control user interface. If the approvers approve the request, CentraSite executes the requested state change. If an approver rejects the request, the policy fails and the requested state change is not executed. Pending approvals appear in the approvers inbox in CentraSite Control as shown in the figure:

Validation is another common task that you can perform using Design and Change-Time policies. You use validation policies to ensure that assets conform to organizational norms and standards before they are accepted into the catalog or enter a critical lifecycle state. For example, you may create validation policies to:

CentraSite provides built-in actions that you can use to perform many validation tasks. You can also create custom actions to perform validation tasks that are specific to your environment.

You can use Design/Change-Time policies to make changes to assets when certain events occur. Setting instance-level permissions on an asset is an example of an update you may incorporate using a policy. Other kinds of changes you may incorporate include classifying an asset, setting a specified attribute when an asset completes a series of tests, and changing an asset's lifecycle state.

CentraSite provides built-in actions that you can use to perform many kinds of updates to assets. You can also create custom actions to modify assets.

Notifying individuals when certain events occur in the registry is another common use case for Design/Change-Time policies. CentraSite includes a built-in email action that you can use for this purpose.

You may, for example, use this action to send an email to key users in your IT organization when a service switches to the Production state of its lifecycle. You may also create custom actions that would send messages to and trigger processes on external systems when certain events occur in the CentraSite registry.

The consumer-registration feature in CentraSite enables users to register users and applications as consumers of an asset. This enhanced feature enables you to complete the registration process without explicitly creating a consumer-registration policy and without requiring the owner of the asset to review and accept the registration request.

If you want to impose an approval process on the consumer registration feature, you might create a design-time policy with one of the CentraSite's built-in approval actions for the OnConsumerRegistration event. This policy includes the Register Consumer action, which performs the actual registration process. It can optionally include other actions, such as Set Consumer Permission action, as needed.

If you use virtual services that are enabled with the LCM, you must create policies that enable an administrator to deploy a virtual service to webMethods Mediator and to make a virtual service undeployable while it is being revised.