Collaboration glossary

3 min

Mastering a new platform requires understanding the terminology.

Glossary terms

Admin – Admin users have access to everything and can view and modify hypotheses. Admins also manage individual users, create teams, configure workflows, and adjust organization settings.

Analytics – The Analytics module provides the information you need to optimize your strategy, including action (conversion) analytics and return on investment (ROI) (depending on your technology integrations).

Brief – A document for an experimentation team that describes a common understanding of a hypothesis. See Add a hypothesis brief for information.

Calendar – The calendar view shows hypotheses in the timeline and editorial views. Modify your view using filters to focus on work that matters to you.

Campaigns – The Campaigns module lets you plan, collaborate, manage, and report on individual marketing initiatives. Each campaign has its own distinct user and team permissions, analytics, and topics. Although campaigns are separate projects, they can run concurrently. They are distinguished by color on the Calendar.

Collaborator – A collaborator can act on assigned work (such as approving, publishing, commenting) or a shared and specific campaign or hypothesis. A collaborator cannot create campaigns or hypotheses.

Creator – A creator has access to the entire platform, with the exception of administrative settings. A creator can create and contribute to hypotheses they create or those that are shared with them.

Custom Fields – Use custom fields to capture additional information, typically for publishing to a content management system (CMS), but does not need to be part of an organization’s taxonomy.

Note

You cannot search or measure custom fields.

Dashboard – The dashboard is your home page for Collaboration.

Events – Events are often used to indicate a noteworthy activity on the Calendar, such as an industry event or holiday for teams. Each event is assigned to an individual campaign. Set events (like upcoming conferences or dinners) on your calendar view.

Experiment (in a Hypothesis) – The corresponding experiment that is configured in a customer's experimentation platform. Choose to add a link to the Experiment Setup URL to maintain a reference to where the experiment exists.

Note

Currently, Optimizely offers the ability to seamlessly link your Web experiments to Collaboration. See Link an Optimizely Web Experimentation experiment to an Collaboration hypothesis.

Experiment run date – Experiment run dates let you communicate when you plan to start or stop an experiment associated with this hypothesis. You can toggle the run date on to display on the timeline view.

Fields – Labels are merged with custom fields under the heading of Fields for unified treatment in core areas of the platform. Users can manage fields, assign fields to campaigns and hypotheses, filter on fields in the Plan module, and perform inline edit operations on the List view in the Plan module. See add fields to the hypothesis for information.

Hypothesis – A hypothesis is the starting point of an experiment. It captures the requirements, workflow, collaboration, and analysis for an experiment in one place. By tracking a hypothesis, a whole team can collaborate across the entire experiment lifecycle: from a new idea waiting to be prioritized in the backlog to a concluded experiment with recorded results. See hypothesis workflow for information.

Labels – Labels mirror your marketing organization's content taxonomy. Organize and filter your marketing content and activities.

Notifications – Customize the types of notifications you receive and whether you receive alerts by email or in-platform. The platform also shows alerts for comments, changes in status, and upcoming due dates.

Request – A work request is an experiment idea submitted by users. A requestor fills in a form, and when a request is accepted, a hypothesis is created, and the experiment and related content are created through that process.

Requests (module) – This feature stores your submitted, accepted, declined, and completed requests. Use filters to find requests you created or that are assigned to you and view their status.

Teams – Create teams for workflow steps with multiple options for approvers.

Templates – Admins can create multiple customized form templates for use in various modules. Apply templates to work requests, hypothesis briefs, and campaign briefs.

Users – Users are the people who contribute to the work. Users have role-based permissions.

Variation – A place to collaborate on designs for variations you want to use in the experiment. Choose to upload images or link to live web pages to support in-line commenting and annotations. You can also write your variations using the text editor.

Workflows – A workflow is a defined process path for each activity, which automatically notifies the person responsible for each function when the prior step is completed. You can assign a workflow to each type of activity that takes place based on what is needed from each team to complete it. Send activities back in the workflow for another review, adjust due dates at any stage, and change approvers. Workflows ensure that no step is missed because it is assigned to a person or a team who must complete it before you can finish the hypothesis.

Workflow actions (optional)

Workflow actions are optional when applied to a hypothesis in Collaboration.

Action Name	Description	Dependency
Write or Edit Content	Gives the step assignee permission to access the content editor to write or edit content.	Must have content added to complete steps in a rigid workflow.
Write or Edit Share	Gives the step assignee permission to write or edit content in the social share widgets on the Publishing tab.	None
Set Publish Destination	Gives the step assignee permission to set a Publish Destination(including feeds and social channels).	None
Set Publish Date	Gives the step assignee permission to alter the Publish Date.If you leave the date unaltered, content is published when you complete the hypothesis.	The Set Publish Destination action must precede the Set Publish Date action.
Select Image	Gives the step assignee permission to add a featured image for an article.	The Write/Edit Content action must precede the Select Image action.
Publish or Share	Gives the step assignee permission to publish or share the content on social media.	The Set Publish Destination action and the Set Publish Date action must precede the Publish or Share action.Must have content or a social share added.
Approve	Gives the step assignee the responsibility of approving the article.	Approve action must be preceded by one of the following actions: Find Content, Write/Edit Content, or Write/Edit Share.If Brand Compliance is turned on for the workflow, the user can approve creative guidelines.
Edit Custom Fields	Gives the step assignee permission to make changes to custom fields.	May require field validation to move forward unless another step has the action.
Edit Labels	Gives the step assignee permission to make changes to the label.	May require field validation to move forward unless another step has the action.