CentraSite is a shared repository and registry. Assets are stored in the repository, and information about those assets, or metadata, is stored in the registry. Both the workspace index and the CentraSite registry contain metadata about assets. The difference is that the workspace index is accessible only by you on your own computer, while the CentraSite registry is accessible to other users. The CentraSite registry resides on and is maintained by a server on the network.

webMethods assets are pre-installed in CentraSite. When you publish metadata to CentraSite from the Package Navigator view or Solutions view, Designer performs a check to ensure that CentraSite has the latest asset definitions. If it does, your publish action is completed. If it does not, you must update your asset definitions in CentraSite before you can publish to it. Contact your CentraSite administrator to have the updated definitions installed.

Although it is possible to configure and connect to multiple CentraSite registries, Designer can connect to a single registry at a time. For more information about connecting to CentraSite, see the CentraSite Help.

Each CentraSite user can belong to only one organization. By default, each member of a CentraSite organization is assigned the roles of Asset Provider and Asset Consumer in the Users group of that organization, allowing the publishing and usage of assets there. Administrators can choose to revoke or change role assignments in the Users group, so the default assignments might be different for some organizations. Administrators can also assign permissions to individual users and groups to view and create (publish) assets in other organizations. Designer does not allow users to select an organization when they publish; it publishes using the organization to which the user belongs. As such, it is important for all collaborating Designer users working on the same project to publish to CentraSite using the same organization. Publishing using multiple organizations could lead to access problems, duplicates, and lost data.

When you reuse an asset from CentraSite, only a minimally required amount of information about that asset is transferred to the workspace where you use it. As a result, when you query the workspace, you do not find the same metadata that you find when you query CentraSite directly.

Reference chains in CentraSite are not fully reflected in the workspace. For example, if process A references process B, which references process C in CentraSite, when you reuse process B in your workspace, the relationship between B and C is not preserved.

CentraSite does not support versioning of webMethods asset types. As such, this functionality is disabled by default for these assets. Do not manually enable versioning for them in CentraSite because this will lead to unavailable assets.

Before making a change to an asset, you might wish to locate any assets that refer to it or are dependent on it. This helps ensure you are not making changes that adversely affect other assets.

Although you can configure Designer to automatically generate and store metadata in the workspace index, you cannot automatically publish metadata to CentraSite. You must select an asset and manually publish it.

Workspace indexing is not required for publishing to CentraSite. Local (workspace) metadata about an asset is created automatically when you enable workspace indexing and is stored locally in the workspace index, which is accessible only on your computer. For more information, see webMethods BPM and CAF Workspace Metadata Help.