Interwoven tames unwieldy Web sites

After registering these push and pull parts, I jumped to ControlHub’s Workflow section to kick off deployment jobs. ControlHub allowed me to create jobs with appropriate approvals. For instance, managers were asked to verify changes on a staging server and then sign off before files were deployed to production. As opposed to some stand-alone workflow systems, however, ControlHub builds the underlying scripts to accomplish each of these steps and then instructs OpenDeploy to move the file to WebLogic, WebSphere, and Windows servers.

Because you don’t have to manually define packages, which can get tricky in multiserver environments, CPS offers lower overhead in larger enterprise settings.

ControlHub’s other main areas show users details of their deployment jobs as well as approval requests. What I’d like to see, however, is for the default work-center view to list tasks that require users’ attention. As it stands, you have to dig through detailed listings to perform approvals and locate anything that requires attention such as a failed job that needs to be rerun. Still, I appreciated CPS’s open design, which allowed me to kick off a workflow from help desk systems or similar enterprise applications, thereby eliminating the need to use ControlHub’s UI all the time.

Via ControlHub, I successfully tested CPS’s rollback function. After selecting this type of workflow, it was easy to select any previous application state, and the system copied the reverted content to production.

CPS records all OpenDeploy and ControlHub events, providing a thorough audit trail and satisfying requests for compliance reports. From the OpenDeploy interface, I quickly reviewed deployments for a set period and then examined detailed reports to see exactly what content changed. In addition to these stock reports, you can create a custom SQL query to generate quick reports based on various search fields.

Interwoven’s CPS helps you standardize the way Web site updates are collected and deployed in test, staging, and production environments. It plays very well with a long list of change and content management systems; captures audit trails; and provides sophisticated branching and work areas that organize change sets for hundreds of applications. Although usability could be improved, I have no doubt CPS will streamline inefficient, manual change and deployment processes.