Core Concepts

The rest of these docs use the following terms precisely, not loosely. Reading this page once will make everything downstream easier to follow.

Tenant

A Tenant is a single organization's isolated account on Crystal Desk — its users, templates, tickets, and media all live within its own tenant boundary, invisible to every other tenant on the platform. As a custom setup, a tenant can be further isolated onto its own subdomain or dedicated infrastructure, but the logical concept is the same either way.

Workflow Template

A Workflow Template is the reusable definition of a process: a set of stages, connected in order, each configured with a required role, an assignment strategy, and a completion form. Templates are versioned — editing a template doesn't retroactively affect tickets already in flight on the previous version.

Stage

A Stage is one node in a workflow template — a named step (Script, Review, Voice Over) with its own type (Task, Approval, Integration, AI Agent, or Notification) and its own configuration for who handles it and what they need to submit.

Ticket

A Ticket is a single, concrete piece of work created from a workflow template — "Diwali Radio Spot — Hindi" is a ticket. It carries the fixed fields (Subject, Priority, Deadline) plus whatever custom fields the template defines, and it tracks its own state independently of every other ticket running on the same template.

Stage Instance

A Stage Instance is the live activation of a stage for one specific ticket. When a ticket is "in Script Review," that's a stage instance — it has its own assignee, its own SLA clock, and its own completion form, distinct from every other ticket that has ever passed through the Script Review stage.

Assignment

Assignment is the act of matching a stage instance to an eligible participant — a human user or an AI Agent — based on the stage's configured role, skill requirements, language matching, roster presence, and workload cap, resolved via Round Robin among the eligible pool.

Revision

A Revision is a stored, timestamped iteration of a field marked "revision enabled." When work is rejected and resubmitted, the new value doesn't overwrite the old one — both are kept, in order, with the submitter's identity attached to each.

SLA

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the number of hours an assignee has to complete a stage once it activates and they're notified. SLAs are configured per stage, not per ticket, and can trigger a pre-breach warning to a supervisor before the deadline is actually missed.

With this vocabulary in place, Building a Workflow is the natural next stop — it walks through constructing a template stage by stage.