Hi Kathy,
I appreciate you taking the time to post to our forum. Your post
clearly indicates that you recognize that there is a problem with the
ISC/AC in the real world user community. I certainly hope that you
will take the advice of this forum and make some changes, mainly bring
back the WebAdmin interface from 5.2 for a period of time to allow us to
smoothly transition form the old to the new interface.
I would like to take just a minute to qualify myself. I have been
around this product since it was ADSM. I have done well over 100
installations over the years. I was a IBM certified instructor and
taught all of the ADSM, then TSM and finally ITSM courses. I helped
develop several of these courses and have been a beta instructor as well
as the instructor for the "teach the teacher" classes. More recently I
have become an IBM Premier Business Partner and we specialize in Tivoli
products. In particular we are well known for storage related
services. I mention all of this to demonstrate that what I am about to
say is not just my opinion but it is what I believe to be the collective
opinion of my customers and employees as well as myself.
I will respond to your comments in line below
--
Regards,
Mark D. Rodriguez
President MDR Consulting, Inc.
===============================================================================
MDR Consulting
The very best in Technical Training and Consulting.
IBM Premier Business Partner
SAIR Linux and GNU Authorized Center for Education
IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert, CATE
AIX Support and Performance Tuning, RS6000 SP, TSM/ADSM and Linux
Red Hat Certified Engineer, RHCE
===============================================================================
Kathy Mitton wrote:
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.
Thank You for recognizing the problem and taking the time to talk with us.
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.
I personally was not involved in these feedback sessions, but I did send
one of my employees. I have attended other such sessions. They are
generally designed so that the developers get the answers they are
looking for. You are guided and prodded all along the way. In this
particular case, when I discussed the new ISC/AC (this was during beta
5.3 testing) with my employee who went to the earlier sessions he was
not aware of the overhead of the new interface nor was he told any of
the problems that are involved in installing the interface. He thought
it was kind of cool, but did not realize it would be a replacement
rather then an add on to the current WebAdmin. These feedback sessions
can be useful, but can also be very easily misleading. Now in regards
to the interface being "intuitive", that seems to be more of a marketing
buzz word then a reality. Making something "intuitive" is a very
elusive target. What may seem intuitive to one person may be totally
incomprehensible to the next. A large part of a persons ability to
intuit through the series of steps for a procedure will have to do with
their background and experience, so I just don't think you can say
something is "intuitive" at all. What you should be shooting for is to
simplify the effort it takes to complete a task. Cut down on the number
of menus you must go through, of mouse clicks, and information typed
in. Make sure that all of your key strokes and mouse clicks are as
efficient as possible, i.e. clicking the go button all the time instead
just hitting enter!
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.
This is an area were IBM has consistently been out of touch with its
customers. I have been around IBM software for a long time. I have
heard various IBM Execs banter around the "single pane of glass"
mantra. The idea was to first get Tivoli product lines on board and
then the other IBM pillars were to get involved. I have heard about
this for years. The problem is it is just not practical. But someone
up on a high has drawn a line in the sand and said "make it so". Well
that's fine, and the truth is it is not even a bad idea for several
different products, however ITSM is not one of them! Why is it that the
product that makes the least sense to do it with is the first one
integrated into the ISC? The "key customer requirement" as you call it
really only represents a very small minority of your customers. That is
the very large IT shops with 10 or more different IBM (mostly Tivoli)
products, do this across distributed sites, and want a central
management console. Yea, that sounds great and gee whiz that would be
cool if we could do all of that, but the vast majority of IBM's customer
not only don't need that they don't want it. IBM should be careful how
they ask the questions. How would you like a single pane of class to
manage all of your IBM products? Is a lot different from; Do you need a
single pane of glass to manage all of your IBM 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).
I am glad the you at least recognize that major interface changes are a
hard transition for customers. It should only be done if the advantages
far out way the cost of change. If you really wanted to make the change
smoother then you should have brought the old WebAdmin interface to ITSM
5.3 and made it clear that this was going to be phased out over the next
couple of release. This would give the customer time to learn the new
interface and still allow them to get their job done. I'll be honest
with you, those flash tutorials are not much more than eye candy. You
really don't learn a great deal from them at all. They way to learn the
new interface is to actually use it. And when you first get started it
takes much more time to get around in the interface until you learn it.
But when there is something important you want to use something that you
know well and can get around in with confidence that is why the old
interface needs to be around during the transition. This isn't about
resisting change it is about making a change a smoothly as possible!
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.
Thank God! If you take this away I will give up on this product all
together. What a large number of the more advanced user would like to
see is some improvement to the CLI. How about developing a scripting
language for the CLI?
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.
Again this is IBM with their heads in the sand. Sure you don't need a
separate system, but them you have to beef up your ITSM server way
beyond what would be required for that environment. For the very large
customers this is no big deal in fact they can setup a separate system
and not really have to think much about it. You try selling this
product into a mid to small size SMB customer and you are going to get
serious push back! The total resource utilization of the ISC/AC needs
to be reeled in. It sucks up way to much memory for what it actually
does. The install process needs to be fixed so that you don't need to
leave behind a huge unwanted temp file space. I am not so upset about
the fact that the ISC/AC are not perfect on their initial release. What
I find upsetting is that the customer is forced into using it with no
good alternative. I realize they could go all CLI which may work for
advanced users but it is not an option for new users.
3. The Readme.install file contains instructions for installing the
ISC/Admin Center in console mode, which facilitates remote installs.
The entire install process for the ISC/AC needs better documentation.
There needs to be more examples of various configurations that might
apply to customer situations, i.e. when to use a separate box or when to
install it on the ITSM server.
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).
Not sure what your point is here. The old WebAdmin was available from
any OS with a browser. The fact that you can't install the ISC/AC on XP
seems fairly obvious.
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.
When you say "footprint" I hope you mean on all resources. Also, you
should find away to streamline the install process. As I stated
earlier. I expect that there will need to be changes and improvements
whenever there is a new product released. However, I would have hoped
for a smoother transition path.
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.
By now I hope you are getting the gist of my message. We need to have
the old WebAdmin in place for at least 18-24 months in order to allow
our customers time for a smooth transition.
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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