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Interwoven will introduce its latest product for the content lifecycle this week when it introduces a solution to automate the provisioning and deploying of changes to Web applications and sites for large enterprises.

Executives at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Interwoven are excited for the company's Content Provisioning Solution, which they say is a first-of-its-kind product because of the problems it seeks to solve in the content lifecycle.

The solution is aimed at the steps of the lifecycle usually handled by an organization's IT operations staff, after a new application or site changes are created or tweaked by developers. Comprised of Interwoven's OpenDeploy and ControlHub software, as well as training and consulting services, the solution aggregates, synchronizes, and deploys all the assets that form a Web site or application.

Aggregation, synchronization, and deployment of Web assets is usually handled by an IT operations staff using a number of manual processes, said Miles Kelly, director of Marketing, IT Solutions, at Interwoven.

"The downside of that manual process is the time it takes," Kelly told Intranet Journal. In the case of one Interwoven customer, a bank in the southeastern United States, the process took as long as two weeks.

Interwoven's solution aggregates changes, deploys them to the test server, gets approval for the changes, pushes them to the live server, and captures recorded edition of the changes. It will allow organizations to increase the number of changes they can make to their Web presence, the company said, because testing and deployment will be streamlined and automated, breaking bottlenecks in the manual process. It will also eliminate the potential for errors. Interwoven executives also estimate customers will save as much as 40 percent on their application management costs.

Interwoven's ControlHub is server software that improves workflow and ensures full regulatory accountability by allowing organizations to record, aggregate, and synchronize all code and content changes.

By offering a repeatable, documented deployment process with an audit trail, Interwoven is also helping to sell the solution on its compliance merits as well. When changes are made and deployed, a record is created of who initiated the changes and the results of the action.

"What we're doing here is standardizing the steps to make changes more repeatable and efficient," said Todd Scallan, director of Product Management, IT Solutions, at Interwoven.

Content Provisioning is also what Interwoven calls an "open solution" because it can be used in a content environment without the entire Interowven suite of products. It works with any code or content management application and will push changes to any server running on any platform.

OpenDeploy aggregates and securely distributes code and content from anywhere to any network destination, including from any file, source code management, or content management system to any network location, including Web servers, file servers, database servers, application servers, or network-edge devices. The ControlHub Server software acts as the hub for application code and configurations, and file and database content. It also adds the workflow and versioning to the solution.

According to Scallan, the idea first came from existing Interwoven customers using the company's TeamSite content management server, which includes OpenDeploy. Some of the largest TeamSite users were taking OpenDeploy out of TeamSite and standardizing it to deploy changes around their enterprise.

"Content provisioning is not for every content management team," Scallan said. "A certain amount of complexity is needed." With that in mind, Interwoven is targeting those in the healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services industries because they feature many of the complexities the solution aims to fix, including:

• The presence of multiple code and content management systems
• A high frequency of changes, especially those spurred on my mergers and acquisitions
• High external exposure to regulations from the SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.
• A large production environment

OpenDeploy is the distribution server software that contains detailed, searchable reports that enable organizations to research and analyze past deployment events as directed by auditors or regulators.