It was a pleasure to meet with the folks of Resolute focused on a very interesting tool called Kivati Studio. (Kudos for building the site on MOSS.) The story of the Kivati name alone is a fascinating one. Resolute is a solution integrator and has been working on SharePoint deployment and development projects for years. Their deployment experience has taught them that asset management is critical to deployment. In our conversations they referred to the build scripts that some of Microsoft's best (Sam and company) put together to push out MSWeb through its various iterations. I can identify with customized deployments and the challenges of managing them. I've done more than a few posts on guidance and governance policies to keep things in success and not Chaos. In fact I'm doing a session at Tech Ed US, TechEd SouthEast Asia, as well as Hawaii, Zurich, and in central Ohio and other various user groups on the topic. I haven't kept track of what "version" of MSW we are on, but I do know there was a lot of batch scripting, and building going on to both out the farm, configure web applications, install solutions, push features, and settings and so on. With a tool like Kivati is would accelerate deployment and compilation of dev assets, from web parts, to features, list and site customizations and on and on.
In the demo that I saw, which from what I understand is the same you can see online, you'll see how in this visual studio-esque /worflow-esque designer you can easily drag on tasks (actions) such as putting in parameters, input from a file or one of 400 such tasks and then see the relationships between the tasks along with dependencies and inputs.
Not only was I impressed, I was a bit overwhelmed by the power of the tool. In the hands of a intelligent dev, I could see how they could save a ton of time doing various common or even not so common tasks such as deleting sites, deleting web parts, creating lists, and really doing design in an automated fashion so it's easily repeatable. In the hands of an ill informed or overeager cowboy, this tool could be disastrous.
I was absolutely impressed by the sheer power of the tool. I think smart people should consider getting it. Dumb people don't think about it. I'm not sure many IT Pros will adopt it. I really see it as primarily the tool that's happening in the dev environment to build what goes to test and gets copied to prod after a full pass. For SI's this tool could really help accelerate a deployment.
Five things I like
1. Accelerated Deployment... fast
2. Developers packing their code
3. Repeatability
4. Consistency
5. Did I say time savings?
Five Notes of Caution for using Tools in this Space (I can't say these are specific to this tool)
1. Powerful tool in the wrong hands (Remember the Frontpage days and now SharePoint Designer, especially Visual Studio... you don't give these tools to anyone.)
2. This being a new tool I didn't see much framework or staged deployment cautions. This tool does NOT replace the need for change management frameworks including core processes and policies.
3. Do not let your devs use these tools in production. Package the stuff and take it to a test environment and iron out the wrinkles.
4. In the hands of an SI (consultant)it will be very slick, make sure they train anyone that becomes responsible for these packages. I caution that you'll need a copy of the tool if you need to maintain or manage it.
5. Make sure you know how to cleanly remove anything you deploy. As I see it the tool can as well create those scripts. Add that in your requirements.
Need more info on Governance, Process, Policy, be sure to check out these recent posts...
You can obviously find out more about the tool on their Kivati website. They do have a free 7 day eval for you to check it out.