At Crownpeak, we have always needed to perform maintenance operations on a customers' content - this is all part of the service. Historically, this was manual talk - brittle and troublesome, but acceptable with caution.
Around a year ago, we re-constructed our demonstration experience, to give birth to Surety, a fictional Insurance Company. The Surety website allows us to showcase much of the Crownpeak capabilities, across all products, in a single location. However, what caused us a bit of a headache was how to deploy multiple versions of Surety across customer, prospect, Sandbox, Engineering, Support & Customer Success DXM Instances - and then do it all again when a new version of Surety was released (every one-to-two-months).
The answer - to build an export and import tool. Crownpeak already had all of the plumbing that we needed, with RESTful APIs to perform CRUD operations against content - we just needed to bring it all together.
Welcome, Crownpeak Digital Experience Management (DXM) Content Xcelerator℠ - a tool designed to export and re-import content out of and back into DXM CMS Instances.
Content Xcelerator℠ is built as a Microsoft Windows Forms Application, in a wizard-style, to guide a DXM Administrator through the process of exporting Assets, Templates, Library Files, Personalization, Publishing Packages & Properties and Workflows into an intermediary XML format (the "manifest"). Content Xcelerator℠ can then be used to re-deploy the same manifest into a different path within the same or separate DXM Instance - allowing the rapid-provisioning of cloned content within DXM.
Content Xcelerator℠ has been built to operate across all content within DXM, thereby making it generic to all use-cases - not only the movement of Surety. We even provide manifests for other reference architectures - see our GitHub integration page for eCommerce provider, commercetools.
commercetools Integration Repo for Crownpeak DXM.
We want you to be able to take advantage of Content Xcelerator℠ within your business - whether using it to rapidly deploy content to kick-start a project, or to assist with content migration from another platform. Therefore, we have made the source code available to everyone under the MIT License. See the GitHub repository at https://github.com/Crownpeak/Content-Xcelerator and feel free to experiment.
Content Xcelerator℠ Repo
Of course, we welcome your feedback on how we can make this better to assist our customers and partners in decreasing time-to-value. Even better still, perhaps you could extend Content Xcelerator℠ yourself, for your own business needs - as the repository is public, fork and start extending!