I’ve spent the past year or so up to my armpits in Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server. My overall impression is that it’s a competent and (mostly) predictable product. But as content management systems go that’s pretty high praise.
I’ve used the SOAP interface to migrate about 8,000 pieces of content (articles, images, etc.) from Vignette V6 and V7 into Cascade Server. There are a few real “gotchas” that made life difficult. For example, link tracking isn’t activated automatically when creating or editing content through the web services interface, at least in Cascade 5.x. Documentation in 5.x is a bit skimpy. There’s no way to output “structured data” as plain text — HTML yes, XML yes, PDF yes, RTF yes … but not plain text.
But for the most part, Cascade Server works as advertised. It doesn’t claim to solve all your problems, but it is quite good at managing and publishing static Web pages. I look forward to the 6.x upgrade, which introduces a “site” metaphor that will help to bring cross-site links under control.
There is one feature of Cascade Server that deserves special mention — the versioning system. As configured by default, each edit to a page creates a new version. It’s trivial to view / audit / compare / roll back / revert between versions. Most importantly, initiating a workflow will create a new version and bind that version to the workflow instance. Editors, approvers, and publishers will work on that version and that version alone. I think it’s even possible to have multiple versions of an article in multiple workflow instances — for example, one version in publishing workflow and another version being bounced around in editing workflow for a later update. To some people this might sound like a bug — but large organizations have silly needs.
Obviously this versioning capability comes at a cost. Cascade Server is very database-intensive, and can be very CPU-intensive depending on the complexity of your XSL stylesheets. (Yes, Xalan has never been accused of excessive speed, nor efficiency.) Its scalability depends in large part on the scalability of your MySQL installation. Hannon Hill recommends circular replication, something which sounds great in theory but scares the living crap out of me in practice. I’d recommend keeping either a very good DBA or a gold-plated support contract to back up large installations.
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