About this Guide

This user guide describes how to use connectCenter, one functional area per section. It is a reference rather than a tutorial: the sections do not have to be read in order, so feel free to jump straight to the feature you need. Screenshots illustrate the key pages, but the guide is best read alongside a running connectCenter instance — follow the instructions while interacting with the tool.

For the typographic conventions used throughout this guide, see Documentation conventions.

Before you start

• No running instance yet? Installation with Docker sets one up, and First Steps walks you through signing in and finding your way around.
• New to the CCS vocabulary? Read Key Concepts first — a short primer on the terms (Core Component, BIE, release, namespace, …) used on every page of this guide.

Know your role

Which menus and actions the application offers — and which parts of this guide apply to you — depend on your user role. connectCenter has two roles, End User and connectSpec Developer ("Developer" for short), plus an Admin right that can be granted to either:

• Developers maintain the standard library: Core Components, developer code lists and agency ID lists, releases, and modules.
• End Users profile the standard library into Business Information Entities (BIEs) for their business contexts, and can extend it with end-user Core Components, code lists, and agency ID lists.
• Admins additionally manage user accounts, application settings, and tenants.

See Types of Users and Their Rights for the complete rights matrix.

What is in this guide

Section	What it covers	Primarily for
Administration	The two user roles (End User and Developer) and the Admin right, with the per-entity rights matrix; user account management (create, edit, enable/disable, remove); password changes and admin password resets; reviewing pending single sign-on (OpenID Connect) requests; the application settings page — feature toggles, SMTP, filename expressions, and web-page branding; terminology selection (CCTS vs connectSpec); and multi-tenant management — tenants, tenant/user and tenant/business-context associations, and the feature restrictions of multi-tenant mode.	Admins
Home Page	The dashboard shown after sign-in: the library and branch selectors and the statistics panels of the Core Components tab (developers only), the BIEs tab, and the User Extensions tab — totals by state, breakdowns by user, and recent and unused items, each linking to a pre-filtered list page.	All users
Core Component Management	The CCS meta-model as implemented by connectCenter (ACC, ASCCP, BCCP, DT, code lists, agency ID lists), CC states and life cycles, ownership, branches, and releases, and searching and browsing the CC library. The developer walkthrough covers editing every developer CC type, namespaces, developer code lists and agency ID lists, the connectSpec BOD macro, release management, module management — serializing developer CCs into XML/JSON Schema files — and the GitHub integration for linking GitHub issues to components. The end-user walkthrough covers end-user CCs, which back BIE extensions: non-standard namespaces, amendments, and their state cycle.	Developers and End Users
BIE Management	Profiling Core Components into BIEs in the tree editor: creating and restricting BIEs, the WIP/QA/Production review cycle, BIE extension, and deriving BIEs by copy, inheritance, and reuse; business contexts with their context categories and schemes; end-user code lists and agency ID lists; expressing a BIE as XML Schema, JSON Schema, OpenAPI 3 template, spreadsheet, or Avro Schema; uplifting BIEs to a newer release; BIE packages; OpenAPI documents; business terms; and the common search, filter, comment, and notification functions.	End Users, and Developers standardizing BIEs