This article provides an overview of the Plan & Release functionality in inRiver.

About Plan & Release

The Plan & Release functionality allows you to monitor the content sent to outbound channels and publications.

Channels and Publications

A Channel is basically an organized collection of entities that you want to publish. Entities are a core concept in an inRiver solution. By associating a channel to an outbound connector, your product information will be published to different receiving systems.

A Publication is similar to a channel, except that the information will be set up for Print via an InDesign connector. Read more about the inRiver Print Plugin in this article.

Both Channel and Publication entities are created in inRiver and support FieldTypes and LinkTypes the same way as other entities.

Overview

Below is an overview of the Plan & Release interface in the Web Portal:

Channels

You create a new channel from the navigation menu in the top navigation bar. 

All information is applicable for both channels and publications, the only difference is the connector and the receiving system.

In each channel you can:

• Edit - Edit fields in a pop-up window.
• Star entity - Create a bookmark on the start page of Enrich.
• Open in Enrich - Take a shortcut to Enrich where you find the selected channel in the product view.
• Delete - Remove the channel and all the links to its content.
• Publish/Unpublish -  Allow or prevent the channel from being published via a connector.

Channel Interface

Below is an overview of the interface when selecting a channel:

In the field to the left, you can open a work area just like in Enrich. This is very useful when populating a channel.

In the field to the right, you can manually add products or create link rules/queries to build out the channel node.

If your channel structure is large, use the filter search box to find different channel nodes.

The Structure tab is where you manage channel nodes in a selected channel. They can be added, moved or removed.

To leverage the full potential of your inRiver solution, it is important to create a Marketing Model that makes product enrichment both easy and efficient. Plan & Release lets you build a channel structure that supports the way an outbound system expects to consume the product information.

Rebuilding or Synchronizing a Channel

It is possible to rebuild or synchronize a channel when the structure or content is out of sync or corrupt. This is not something that you have to do often. For instructions on how to rebuild or synchronize a channel, read  this article. 

Synchronize Channel will try to resolve and rearrange the entities within a channel. If the structure is corrupt, this will not fix the problem and you have to use the Rebuild Channel option.

Rebuild Channel will completely remove the channel structure and build it up again from scratch, based on the actual links. This can take time and should be used with caution.

Important: These jobs should not be run at the same time.

Video Tutorial 

Further Reading

inRiver Core Functionality

Get an inRiver license to view below content:

Linking Many Entity Types to a Channel Node

Rules and Queries in Plan & Release

Intelligent Linking in Plan & Release