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,
