Define Your Plugins

Releasing Components is easy. You create a plugin that does a job. This job can be anything you like:

• Create a user in your directory server
• Compile and deploy a JEE application
• Create a table in your Oracle database
• Pull a host out of a load balanced pool

You can write the plugin actions in any language you like! This will be a combination of your staff's expertise, as well as a language relevant to the task you're carrying out. You can use Unix shell, Windows Power Shell, Groovy, Java or even C if you like.

Define Your Components

Next, create a Component that uses this plugin. This is where you fill in the details of the job: source code, users, etc.

Create as many Components as you like based on the plugin. There is no limit to the number of Components you can create and manage in Tableaux.

Deploy

Deploy the Component into a development environment. This creates a build by which it can be identified later on. Track the versions of the component as they progress through the environments.

You can have as many versions of the Component in your pipeline as you want.

Aggregate Into Release Kits

You can manage and deploy your components by hand, but that gets tedious once you have to manage more than a handful.

Create a Release Kit that includes all the components you've built so far. The Release Kit defines a baseline version for all the components.

The Release Kits can encompass Components, manual steps or other Release Kits. You can create "building blocks" kits that perform common functions for inclusion in other kits. Re-use of these kits yields enormous time savings.

Deploy Your Release Kits

Deploy the Release Kit to your test and production environments. Tableaux provides a "digital war-room" to conduct the release. You can visually track the status of the release, and quickly diagnose any problems that may occur.

You can even forward schedule your releases, which provides several benefits:

• Your Change Advisory Board can visually see the upcoming releases
• Tableaux can perform unattended releases, saving overtime costs

Implementation Plans

A great feature of the Release Kits is that you get an implementation plan for free! The Release Kit contains all the essential information required to produce an Implementation Plan, so with a single button click Tableaux can generate your implementation plan for you.

The release kits and implementation plans are re-usable. This saves your Release Managers weeks worth of time compared to building an implementation plan by hand in Excel.

Accurate to the Last File

Tableaux guarantees that the release kit you deploy to test environments is the same kit you deploy to production. Same kit. Same process. Same baseline.

A side effect is that Tableaux gathers history on deployment timings. Tableaux uses this history to provide accurate deployment time estimates. This enhances your release planning process because you can be well assured that you have the best possible information at hand.