I think a number of people have summed up the issues here well, no need for
me to harp on them. The one exception I would make is in regards to
creating an 'intuitive interface'.
So far, IMHO, the interface is far from intuitive. While I can see the
theoretical logic behind burying the Schedules section underneath Policy
Domains, it took myself (with 7 years of TSM implementation and usage
experience) and my current client several minutes to find it. There are
some places where clicking on an icon brings up the properties window for
the item, others where you must instead use the pull-down menu to get
properties, meanwhile clicking on the icon initiates another wizard of some
kind. Many of the windows that are designed to "explain" what's happening
are needlessly cluttered and wordy. If you're going to explain everything,
give us a prominent help button beside the options instead - It's a pain in
the butt to skim over whole paragraphs of text to try to find the two
options you're looking for, which have incidentally been named differently
than the traditional name for the option, further making it difficult to
find.
Then there are the functional decisions that have been made regarding
'hiding' configurations from the user. For example, if the ISC has anything
to say about it, Policy Sets are a thing of the past. I have yet to find a
reasonable way to view all policy sets, add a policy set or remove one.
Yet it is assumed that the server has a STANDARD policy set that
automatically gets validated and activated when updating an mgmt class or
copy group, with no opportunity for you to see the validation and *not*
activate. *However*, when you add or remove mgmt classes (as opposed to
updating the copy groups within them), the policy set is NOT validated nor
activated. Yet, the ISC returns a successful prompt, claiming that your
work here is done, when in fact the mgmtclass/copy groups you've just
added/removed are not in the Active policy set. There is a drop down menu
on the Policy Domain (why is it at the domain level?) for Activating the
Policy Set. Not just any policy set, but THE policy set, which must be
named STANDARD otherwise it breaks. For newbies, there's no indication of
why one would want to do this, given that policy sets are mentioned nowhere
else. And it validates and Activates in one shot, without showing you the
output of the validation so you can see something is wrong. Frankly, this
is multiple bits of buggy behavior. Make a choice - either make it work
correctly so the end-user doesn't need to know that policy sets exist, or
give us the chance to work with our policy sets.
One of the single biggest features I liked about the old Web Interface is
gone - the command line at the bottom. For those of us who find some
benefits to using the GUI, and some benefits to using the CLI, this was a
great tool - the GUI was at our side, but the CLI was always *right* *there*
when we wanted it, and the output was cleanly put into the browser window in
a way we could scroll along easily. The CLI in the ISC is in an annoying
place to get to, you can't easily keep it at your fingertips, and the output
it provides is formatted in an annoyingly short width that causes many
typical queries to go into long format making them harder to read at a
glance. Please, if you do nothing else, find a way to get us the "always
there" CLI back and fix the output. As it sits now, I have to open up the
old fashioned black CLI in another window and jump back and forth to run
commands.
There's a number of other small bugs that need to be worked out, I'm sure
they will be - any new product is bound to have growing pains. But I
think there's still a lot of work to do.....
regards,
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Mitton" <kmitton AT US.IBM DOT COM>
To: <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 8:19 PM
Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM 5.3 Administration Center
We?ve noticed the recent discussion and concern in this forum surrounding
the new TSM 5.3 Administration Center. We are listening to you, and we
would like to respond to several of the points raised.
First, we would like to explain why we made these changes. The old
interface had not been changed in over 8 years and had fallen behind the
times. One of the top customer requirements was for an easy to use,
intuitive interface. A number of existing customers as well as customers
using competitive products were involved throughout the development
process. They not only participated in defining what they were looking
for but also participated in early design reviews.
As a result of that work, the Administration Center was created. Wizards
help guide you through common configuration tasks, and properties
notebooks allow you to modify settings and perform advanced management
tasks. The interface was integrated into the Integrated Solutions Console
because one key customer requirement is a ?single pane of glass? view of
all of the servers in their environment. Since IBM plans on integrating a
large variety of our software products into the Integrated Solutions
Console, it made sense for Tivoli Storage Manger to be there, too. The IBM
direction is to have a common look and feel across a large product set,
and the Integrated Solutions Console is driving that common look and feel
across multiple products.
We understand that it is hard to give up an interface you know well and
switch to a new one. To help you with this transition, we developed
several Flash tutorials which are available from within the Administration
Center. These tutorials show you how to maneuver within the Administration
Center. Click the ?Getting Started? link on the main screen to launch
these Flash tutorials. We will continue to monitor your feedback on this
forum and we are tracking your suggestions, criticisms (and hopefully
occasionally your kudos).
There are also some additional points you?ve raised that we would like to
address here:
1. The command line interface (dsmadmc) is still available in TSM 5.3. We
have no plans to remove dsmadmc from future releases. We recognize that a
great many of our customers use automated scripts with dsmadmc.
2. A separate machine is NOT required for the ISC/Administration Center
installation. It can run on the same hardware as your TSM Server, provided
you meet the minimum system requirements, as described in the version
release page referenced below. In addition, there is a performance
Technote available by searching for 1193443 at http://www.ibm.com.
3. The Readme.install file contains instructions for installing the
ISC/Admin Center in console mode, which facilitates remote installs.
4. Since the Administration Center is accessed via a browser, it is
accessible from
any operating system, including XP. Relative to installing the
Administration Center itself on XP, since XP tends to be a workstation OS
rather than a server OS, we aren't currently recommending XP for the
actual Administration Center. (Note that we don't support/recommend the
TSM server on XP either and our thought process was that ultimately the
Administration Center would be supported on all of the same platforms as
the TSM server. Since you interface via a browser, you ultimately have
access from any OS).
5. We?ve heard your concern and complaint about the footprint of the
Administration Center. We don?t have a quick fix for this but are
continuing to look at ways to reduce this.
6. We have heard your requests to bring back the old interface. Since
that interface was not uplifted with the new TSM 5.3 function and our
intent is to only enhance the new interface, we decided not to release
it. Instead we are focusing on continued enhancements to the new
interface at as rapid a rate as is possible.
We have several online resources to assist our customers. We have written
some ?Technotes? which outline the steps for a variety of common TSM
tasks. These documents can be found by referencing Technotes 1193101 and
1193326 at http://www.ibm.com, or by pointing your web browser to the
following URLs:
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&q1=1193101&uid=swg21193101&loc=en_US&cs=iso-8859-1&cc=us&lang=en
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&q1=1193326&uid=swg21193326&loc=en_US&cs=iso-8859-1&cc=us&lang=en
In addition, the version release page has links to all of the above, and
more information. The version release page is at at:
http://www.ibm.com/software/sysmgmt/products/support/IBMTivoliStorageManagerVersionRelease.html
Lastly, using the keyword TSMADMINCENTER in the search field on the
support web site will provide you the latest information about the
Administration Center.
The entire TSM development team would like to thank you for your patience
in reading this and hope it will give you some insight into why we made
some of these decisions. We think TSM 5.3 is a great product that contains
many enhancements in addition to an exciting new interface. We encourage
you to learn more about TSM 5.3 by reading the version release page listed
above.
Sincerely,
Kathryn Mitton
TSM 5.3 Server Development Release Manager
Tivoli Software,
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