In 2009, we sent all our senior developers on a field trip up north to learn the ways of TeamSite at the Interwoven training center. After many days of intense training under Interwoven experts, they returned to our office with a better understanding and appreciation of the technology. Almost immediately, we were able to put our training into action with the redesign of Dignity Memorial. After the initial learning curve, we found out that the Interwoven platform lives up to its promise of handling large scale site development with enough flexibility to customize it to specific project requirements.

For those who are unfamiliar with Interwoven, it is a company that is almost synonymous with its flagship CMS product, TeamSite.  Over several years of development and enhancements, Interwoven expanded their line to include several products and technologies to complement TeamSite.  Some of these products were developed at Interwoven, others were created from acquiring other companies’ technologies, and others exist as software as a service (SaaS).

Ironically, one of the first aspects of dipping into their technology is simply to understand which of their products are necessary to drive your project.  For you designers out there, think of it just a little bit like all the different Adobe CS bundles:  Web Premium, Design Premium, Production Premium, etc.   With that example, if you buy Web Premium, it doesn’t come with InDesign…so you’ll find yourself out of luck if you need to do a print project months after purchase.

Interwoven is similar in this way.  TeamSite standing alone is essentially a tool to manage the location of content.  Think of it much like the documents folder on your computer – it’s a way to store your text documents and photos.  TeamSite is like your documents folder on steroids.  Following the same analogy, you can see how your documents folder could not all of a sudden be a beautiful website.  You will need something else to make that happen.  Enter OpenDeploy.

OpenDeploy is the technology that routes through TeamSite file structure, grabs files and puts them where they need to go.  Greatly oversimplifying the process, when a site’s content is assembled together, OpenDeploy says, “take the graphics from this folder, the text documents from this folder, the buttons from this folder and put them all here for microsite #1, put a bunch of different files over there for microsite #2, and so on.”

Next, LiveSite is used to take the files that were gathered by OpenDeploy to draw a web page.  LiveSite brings together the actual content (files) and splices it together with logic of what should go where on a web page, including all the interactive functionality like search, menu functions, hyperlinks, Flash etc.  It also makes the correct localized content appear, for instance if a user has decided to change the language from English to Spanish.

Now TeamSite, Open Deploy and LiveSite have come together to draw a web page, but how do you then update the content of the page?  Well, for that you need SitePublisher.  SitePublisher is the front end tool to make it easy for WYSIWYG style editing of webpages and content…for you Adobe folks out there, it’s a tad like Dreamweaver, if Dreamweaver is a fishing boat and SitePublisher is an aircraft carrier.  With SitePublisher, one can control content on websites on a very large scale (in our case, over a thousand individual sites).  Using this tool, we are able to make global content changes, including automated logic for localization, without having to crack open any Java.

So there you have it – four separate Interwoven products coming together to power an enterprise website.

However, please let me take a moment to underscore that I’m just giving a high level overview of their products and I’ve been hugely oversimplifying the process we went through to build Dignity Memorial.  To make all this happen takes thousands of hours of programming, configuring, customization and testing.  Even more, I didn’t go into any detail on all the non-Interwoven effort behind the project, like design, HTML/CSS and a ton of Java programming to wire in all sorts of custom functionality and logic.  Interwoven certainly provides a framework of tools that brought some significant efficiencies to our process, but it still requires focus, hard work and talent to bring it all together.  I have to hand it to our entire team for a wonderful job and all the late nights they spent on the project.  Thank you everyone for a job very well done!

Contact us today to find out how TeamSite can work for you!