Think back to Schoolhouse Rocks and “How A Bill Becomes A Law”, and you have a good idea of the process by which firewalls at Fortune 500 companies change. We designed Playbook to handle that level of complexity. Here’s how it works:

• Customers may be the driver for your firewall rule changes. Playbook has a simple internal ticketing system. Customers can request changes and get status, and, crucially, you don’t have to give them accounts on Playbook to do that.

• When you start working on a ticket, Playbook remembers the ticket. When you make rule changes while Playbook is tracking a ticket, Playbook tags the rule with the ticket. All the changes you make in Playbook are traceable.

• Like Wikipedia, everyone with a Playbook account can edit almost everything they can see. Unlike Wikipedia, those changes can’t doom you. Changes are only merged with the rules that actually hit firewalls when an editor user (with special privileges) approves them. Your team can sit around a conference table and review diffs onscreen, or circulate them via email and sign off on them. Workflowy!

• Changes never hit firewalls until you tell Playbook to push them. We know most of you can’t change rules during the business day.

Last updated on September 17, 2009 by Thomas Ptacek