May 00 NetManage
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Network Management
Seybold
By John C. Welch
A Network Administrator's Eye View of Seybold
Boston
Seybold is an interesting show for a network administrator. Considering the main
focus of the show is publishing and graphics, both online and print, initially it seems
that there is not much for the IS-type other than free demos and other souvenirs. But,
also consider that many of the products shown at Seybold are designed to be on a
network, or function as servers, and an admin's need to be there is suddenly a little
more obvious. I had two main purposes at Seybold Boston 2000. The first was to see
how many vendors were really making products that fit well into a network, as
opposed to those that merely work on one. The second was to look for products that
would make my life as an admin, and by extension the professional lives of you readers
easier in some way.
Seybold in General
Comparing Seybold to MacWorld, the most obvious difference is size. Seybold tends to
be much smaller, but this is to be expected, it's a more focused conference. Another
difference is in the booth personnel. I found much more of a delay at Seybold in getting
the technical experts for a company or booth than at MacWorld. In one case, getting my
question answered required finding a different company on a different floor. This gets
tiring quickly, literally as well as figuratively. Another issue for first - time Seybold
attendees is floor organization. Seybold is smaller, but, (to me at least), seems not as
well organized as MacWorld, and I find that keeping the program is an absolute
necessity to find specific booths without walking both floors.
Other than those few admittedly picayune issues, Seybold is like any other trade show,
big, colorful, and loud. There are a good number of vendors there, and if it deals with
publishing in any remote way, it's probably at Seybold. Much has been made of Apple's
absence from this year's Seybold Boston. From a floor point of view, it wasn't as big a
deal as some made it out to be. The space that Apple would have used was taken over by
other vendors quite well, and Adobe seemed to be pleased with its undisputed status as
the Big Vendor of the show.
Network Support
There are a lot of servers, and network enabled products at Seybold. From print
servers to document control, to security, the publishing industry is well-networked.
But this is only from the user viewpoint. As an administrator, I was consistently
disappointed in the almost total lack of administrative support in these server
products. With few exceptions, when I would ask, "How does the server let me, the
administrator, know that it is having a problem?", there would be a few minutes of
huddled discussion, and then I would get variations of "The users will call you", or "It's
very reliable, that shouldn't be a problem". Well, unfortunately, waiting for someone
to notice a critical piece of software is no longer functional is not a option in a
networked environment. Especially in the case of multiple sites, waiting for user
input can delay problem resolution by hours, and days.
One of the rods that IS managers get applied to their backs is the proactive rod. It is no
longer enough to respond to trouble reports. Nowadays, we need to be notified of
problems the very microsecond it occurs. Whether via SNMP1 or email, or instant
message, network administrators need to know before the user that a server is down.
As well, if a given piece of hardware is running multiple server applications,
administrators need to know that server application A is dead, but B and C are fine.
These are not minor issues to administrators, but they are almost unknown to many of
these vendors.
This is not to say that none of the vendors are aware of this. Quite a few are at least
including email notification abilities of errors. This is a good start, but I would still
push for SNMP inclusion. The reason is, SNMP operates at a lower level than the
application. Therefore, it can catch errors that the application may be unaware of, or
take a while to notice. As well, via the trap mechanism, you can set up the app to notify
a given management server of an error, and the server can then decide if it needs to
notify anyone based on the error severity. The SNMP standard is well documented, and
used by many vendors including Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, and Sun, as a way of
improving the network fit of their products. I would close this section by pointing out
that if I have a choice between two similar server/networkable applications, of
similar quality and feature set, but one has good error notification support, and the
other doesn't, the one that makes my job easier will win, even at a substantially
higher cost.
Products of Note
Again, although most of Seybold is not specifically targeted to the network
administrator, there were some products that made me perk up a little. The first one
isn't a product as much as it is a service. Sprockets, <http://www.sprockets.com> is a
company providing online project management services. The service is based on
Oracle, and uses a per project and a traffic pricing model for charges. What caught my
eye about sprockets though, was how much potential it has. By basing charges on
bandwidth utilization, instead of the number of users, Sprockets allows a project to be
limited by use, instead of users. For a multi-company/multi-national project, since
there is no physical location to a Sprocket - based project, other than the Web, the
traditional problems of distribution and allocation of resources are greatly reduced,
possibly eliminated. There is also less reliance on a particular piece of equipment or
location, as the Sprockets site handles storage and maintenance. Since Sprockets is
based on Oracle on Solaris, not only is it scalable to as high a degree as you need, but it
is also highly flexible, and can handle almost any user requirements. Interviews with
the Sprockets staff also showed that they are very aware of security issues, and
understand the need to be proactive in protecting user data. They also went out of their
way to inform me that they are sensitive to the confidentiality of user data, and under
no circumstances would they use that data as a marketing tool. Considering the
confidentiality debacles that have arisen on other web sites, this is an excellent
attitude. I see Sprockets as being on the leading edge of what I call RSPs, or Resource
Solution Providers. They really aren't providing you with an application, but rather
with the infrastructure and resources you need to use the applications and capabilities
you already have. To my mind, this is more along the lines of what the Web should be.
Another product that impressed me was MassTransit, from Group Logic Inc.,
<http://www.grouplogic.com>. MassTransit is basically a combination of intelligent
file routing and AppleScript Folder Actions. The whole purpose of MassTransit is to
make getting files from a to z, with all stops in between a process with intelligence
behind it, rather than relying on users to manually do it. The MassTransit server,
creates drop folders that users can mount on their desktops as remote drives. Files
placed in that folder are then acted on by a number of rules, based on the needs for the
task that file relates to. What makes this better than folder actions is two - fold. First
off, the folder can be closed, and still have intelligence behind it, unlike folder actions
that require the folder to be open to function. This is due to the rules being processed
on the server, not the end station(s). Secondly, the actions are a combination of
choices from a list and AppleScript, rather than solely AppleScript like Folder Actions
are. Since the rules are processed on the server, you only need to create them once,
rather than replicating AppleScripts to possibly hundreds of machines. This also
means the client machines don't need to be acting as servers, so your resource usage is
more efficient. By creating canned actions, such as "Email on copy error", "Email files
from x to z", and combining them with AppleScripts, you get quick initial functionality
with as much flexibility as you would ever need. For companies trying to deal with the
problems of document routing and approval, MassTransit is a worthwhile look.
There were also many other useful admin products, and trend towards making security
a part of document control, especially with Acrobat PDFs that should make an
administrator quite happy.
Conclusion
As with any other show, Seybold is exactly as useful as you make it. Even though it
sometimes took longer than I would have liked, I was always able to get the answers I
needed. Unfortunately, the publishing industry is only just starting to comprehend the
need for communicating status in ways that don't involve having users on the phone
screaming at tech support. I am hoping that next year, Seybold Boston will have more
products that are administratively as friendly as they are user friendly.
______________________________
John Welch <jwelch@aer.com> is the Mac and PC Administrator for AER Inc., a
weather and atmospheric science company in Cambridge, Mass. He has over fifteen
years of experience at making computers work. His specialties are figuring out ways
to make the Mac do what nobody thinks it can, and showing that the Mac is the superior
administrative platform.