Introducing USoft Delivery Manager

When you develop rules-based applications in the USoft platform, you don't just use a single computer. The need naturally arises to have different environments for different purposes: development, test, acceptance, production, laboratory, demo, training, separate locations for modular development...

With this need also comes the need for easy transfer of deliverables and application data between machines for these various purposes. Delivery Manager is the component of the USoft platform that helps you automate these tasks.

Roughly, USoft Delivery Manager is able to act as a release manager and as a repository manager. It is not a backup-and-recovery tool for administrators.

Many of USoft Delivery Manager's functions may be compared to those of a version management tool as used by developers of object-oriented code, such as .git. The difference is that USoft Delivery Manager is expert in handling repositories stored in an RDBMS. This is important because, unlike applications in many other coding environments, the larger part of every USoft application is located in database records and not on the file system.

With USoft Delivery Manager, you can automate many of the steps necessary to deliver a USoft application from Development to target environments such as Test, Acceptance and Production. Delivery Manager allows you to manage this delivery process adequately.

In this role, Delivery Manager makes it easy for you to:

•register all the versions of all the deliverables.

•distribute software to multiple target machines in a controlled and repeatable fashion.

•make traceable how and when software was delivered.

•compare versions of delivered software.

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USoft Delivery Manager in its role of release manager

You can use USoft Delivery Manager in its role of repository manager for a variety of data management operations, such as:

•comparisons between the main Development environment and temporary or permanent special-purpose copies of Development,

•initialisation of test data,

•automation of data management tasks such as authorisation and synchronisation,

•duplication of Production data for testing in an Acceptance environment.

This data management capacity applies to the management of application data, but also metadata and authorisation data.

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USoft Delivery Manager in its role of repository manager