Tableaux

Tableaux helps organisations regain control of their development and deployment practices by allowing software changes to be easily and rapidly deployed with complete reproducibility. This not only allows the deployment process to become a well-managed and controlled activity but improves productivity and predictability while reducing costs and project time scales. This is achieved by eliminating ad-hoc error-prone manual deployment processes and instead using an automated, controlled, extensible and easy-to-use deployment management tool.

Background

Today's best-practice thinking on selecting an eBusiness platform typically involves choosing best of breed components from a number of vendors. Each vendors' tool sets don't know about each other adding to complexity during integration, testing and deployment activities. Furthermore, even if it were possible to standardise on a single vendor's eBusiness platform (still difficult to do but becoming a more realistic option in some cases) that platform would still have multiple tools and many different files and data formats that would need to be supported. Clearly a deployment management tool which accommodates many vendors tools (or many tools from any single vendor) is required.

Today's best-practice methodologies need to support both traditional and agile practices. Agile practices encourage iterative development which greatly facilitates meeting an evolving set of requirements but also imposes constant change on the deployment environments. A deployment management tool which facilitates rapid cycles of change without resorting to ad-hoc practices is needed to support these best practices.

Today's best-practice development paradigms use techniques such as declarative programming which discourage developers from embedding configurable information directly in their code but instead to place such information in configuration files. These configuration files may be changed during development, deployment or tuning by developers, DBAs, content developers or systems administrators. Keeping track of these additional files, securing them so that only people with appropriate roles are allowed to update the appropriate files and keeping all the stakeholders informed of when changes take place can be a difficult problem and appropriate tool support will make this problem addressable.

Features

Key Features

Key features of Tableaux include:

• Process-driven deployment using an extensible project-type framework
• Automated build structuring and management supporting versioning
• Central point of control using an easy-to-use web-based interface
• Role-based security system leveraging existing security frameworks if needed
• Simple tool integration to leverage your existing investments
• Management reporting and metrics
• Simplified workflow management
• Automated notifications of changes and new deployments

Tool Integration

Tableaux works with your existing version control, build and automated testing tools to provide a complete deployment management solution. Organisational knowledge of your workflows and practices relevant to particular tools can be captured in customisable project-types using Tableaux's extensible framework.

Process Definition and Enforcement

Tableaux allows deployment processes to be defined using an extensible framework. These processes define how

Best Practice Enterprise Configuration Management Built-In

Tableaux With increasingly distributed development teams and the complexities of cross-platform environments, the last thing you need is a complicated implementation project.

Role-Based Security

Benefits

• Improved organisational awareness of application inventory
• Greater code reuse through enforced capturing of dependencies
• Costs are reduced because error-prone manual steps are eliminated
• Project time-frames significantly reduced (administrative tasks take minutes instead of hours, days or weeks)
• Greater management awareness of the status of servers and projects

Platform Support

• Intel/x86-based systems:
  • Windows XP, 2000, NT 4.0
  • Windows 95/98/Me (client support only)
  • Linux (kernel versions 2.0.36 +, RedHat 5.0 +)
  • FreeBSD (version 3.3 +)
• Sun systems: Solaris (version 2.5.1 +)

About Tableaux

Tableaux was originally developed by Incanica Pty Ltd. ASERT has now partnered with Incanica to help extend the functionality and increase platform coverage of the tool and assist with integrating Tableaux into a growing number of corporate and government customers' deployment practices.