Carol Trible wrote: "It seems that long term customers tend to stick to the 
command line, but new customers who start with the Administration Center like 
it, so I would reccomend giving it a try."

I started administering TSM in 2006, and my first task was to install the 
Administration Center for the first time at this site.  I've used it ever since.
I am currently using the 6.1 release to administer two 5.5.3.0 servers and one 
5.5.1.0 server.
(Incidentally, I had trouble finding the software for the new Admin Center, and 
so did the first three IBM staff members who tried to help me.  
Although the installation process tells you it is  "Installing... TSM 
Administration Center", the product name you have to look for now is "Tivoli 
Storage Manager Reporting and Monitoring".)

The 6.1 Admin Center is genuinely better than previous releases, and twice as 
fast, but it's still agonizingly slow for longer inquiries.
Some queries are impossible when using the Admin Center command line interface, 
because they die before returning results.
For the last few months, I've had a Servergraph tool to use as well, and 
inquiries that take only seconds with Servergraph take ten minutes using the 
Admin Center.

I'd certainly recommend that new TSM administrators try out the Admin Center - 
it's so useful - but you still need a LOT of patience to use it.

- Margaret Clark
Systems Programmer, San Diego Data Processing Corporation