Admin Branch

sunil_j

Interwoven Professional Services always recommends an "admin" branch to be created for managing and controlling the various configuration files.

I wish to know more on this and what are the steps that need to be done to create and populate such a branch. What should be the workarea structure, what content to import and how to configure the deployment etc etc..?

Any best practices on creating and manging an admin branch?

Regards
Sunil

Technical Consultant
Sydney (Australia)

skip11

Hi,

It's really quite easy to implement. We keep all the workflow config, iw config, and some Weblogic config
in a so called admin branch. We develop the config, say for a new workflow, and when it's working, we upload
it to the admin branch and then it's available to be submitted to the next testing platform. We deploy the
config to a similar admin branch on the next machine, proof it again, and then deploy it to <iw-home>/../../.
We also update the config directly in the admin branch, so there is no need to upload it there. In this respect,
we have a source code management system by default for the workflow config.

This allows us to keep the running config on each Solaris box up to date. To be able to do this, a config file
for the platform specific values in the config is highly desirable. This allows the workflow to be completely platform
independent - it's all controlled by the centrally located config file.

Careful attention to group ownership for the admin branch is very important, and if a workflow is used
to move the content around, use of acls in the worflow, ensures that the config is never deployed
by just anyone. the acl can dictate whether a pid can do the work, or whether a user in a role can do it.

We also can create Solaris packages out of the config in the admin branch, for those special situations where deployments are
forbidden.

Hope this helps,

Ralph Barger
CSFS TOP
Zurich