Step 2 · Set up your house

Available now once RND has approved your organisation. Your house is your

publisher workspace: the shared bus your newsroom's apps and your vendors' apps run on, with synthetic content only.

Get your house

Via RND Request access from the home page and choose A publisher

(Request access). Say which systems you want to try SOM with; your newsroom map from step 1 is the best answer. When RND approves the request, you get two workspaces:

• Your house, the publisher workspace, where your apps and your vendors' apps exchange messages.
• Your workbench, a vendor-type workspace of your own, where you grade your in-house apps with test runs, which never run in a house. See Your workbench.

Invite your colleagues yourself, to the house and to the workbench, from the Team page in each: see Your team.

Connect your in-house systems

Available now For each in-house system in your inventory, create an app in

the portal and connect it to your house, as any vendor would:

For a system that	Connect it as	Read
Publishes	A producer, with the system_ids it stamps and the message types it may publish	Credentials, Authenticate
Receives	A consumer connection, with its message types and, optionally, a topic prefix and sources	Consumer connections, Filters
Runs skills	Both: a consumer for its triggers, a producer for skill.warning.raised	Skills and executors

Your developers then follow the vendor pages for each system, and are held to the same checks. To grade an in-house app, connect the same app to your workbench too: each connection has its own client secret.

Set story ownership

Available now Open Story ownership and list the hand-offs you decided in

step 1. Leave the mode on warn while you test: a snapshot from a system that isn't the owner is accepted, and the warning shows in the portal. Switch to reject when you trust your map. See Story ownership.

Add an observer

Available now Create one consumer connection of your own that receives

everything: message type *, no sources. It's a wiretap on your house. Read it over the HTTPS pull API to:

• keep your own record of every message in your scenarios, beyond the portal's 7 days;
• check that what each consumer should have received was sent;
• feed your own dashboards.

Messages wait 14 days in its queue. It counts toward your workspace's consumer connections like any other.

A first story

Before any vendor joins, prove the house works with your own story owner, or with a script if the owner is a vendor's product:

1. Validate one snapshot in the Playground. An accepted dry run lists the connections that would receive it.
2. Publish a three-snapshot story with a fresh story_id.
3. Open Story timeline: the three snapshots should be there in order, with what changed between them.
4. Read your observer: it should hold all three, in order.

With no newsroom system to hand, a rehearsal

Available now plays a whole workflow through your house, with RND stand-ins in the

roles you haven't connected.

House rules for your vendors

Write down, and send to every vendor with their brief:

• your naming (step 1);
• synthetic content only: the sandbox is for testing, never for real stories;
• which story types and workflows you'll test them on;
• who to contact on your side, and how you'll share results.

Your vendors accept the house terms when they join; your rules sit on top of those.

Next: Step 3 · Bring in your vendors.