System and Business Administration Overview

What does it mean to administer the Pro/INTRALINK environment? Traditionally it has been a combination of managing the hardware and network environment, ensuring that the software is configured properly to allow the end users to perform their jobs and supporting those users by answering questions and troubleshooting issues.

With the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK, your job will be extremely similar… and extremely different. When you break it down to a more detailed level, the system administration, business administration and user support / troubleshooting techniques will differ because of the underlying technologies that drive the web-based Pro/INTRALINK environment and its interaction with Pro/ENGINEER.

As you've learned through the installation process, the core architecture of Pro/INTRALINK requires:

• A web server and servlet engine (including the Info*Engine web services)
• An Oracle database and a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory service
• Specific Pro/INTRALINK and Windchill services and core software

Whereas Pro/INTRALINK 3.x has always had the Data Server Management Utility, the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK provides tools through the Oracle Enterprise Manager Console, the LDAP Browser and, to some extent, through the context (Site, Organization, Product or Library) Administrator's Utilities page.

System Administration
Arguably the most important role of the System Administrator, once the software is installed, is to ensure that regular and complete backups of the system are being performed. Since you'll be managing Pro/ENGINEER files in Pro/INTRALINK it is HIGHLY recommended that you set the system up to vault the CAD Document content in external vaults. This will save time and processor/RAM overhead on the Oracle processes by not trying to store these very large files in Oracle Binary Large Objects (BLOBs).

When it comes time to backup your Pro/INTRALINK system, it is critical that you backup the database, the external file vault(s), content cache vaults and the LDAP directory at the same point in time to maximize the possibility of a rapid recovery in case of a catastrophic disk failure. Replicated vaults can also be backed up to ensure a rapid recovery, but if they're not available, the data can be recovered by the primary data stores listed above.

Regardless of the details of the backup procedures and tool sets used, it is most imperative that the backup occur regularly onto redundant media. Also, it cannot be overstated that the recovery procedures are tested occasionally to ensure that the process and technology function flawlessly in bringing the system back online as quickly as possible. With my past history in Pro/INTRALINK services, it is nothing short of amazing the number of times I have been contacted by customers to help them recover some portion of their data due to server hardware failure. In many cases, backups either didn't exist or were so old as to render them useless.

Business Administration
Administering the Pro/INTRALINK business environment really deals with setting up users with access control rules, administering the Products and Libraries, setting up system preferences and ensuring that the configuration maps adequately to your engineering release procedure. Some of these configurations will be applied to *.properties files through the xconfmanager utility and some will be applied to *.ini files.

Most of these business administration tasks will be performed through settings within the proper context's Utilities page. As a general rule, you will want to avoid configuring your settings at the Site level. For settings that will span all or most of your products and libraries it makes more sense to apply those settings within the Organization context. Although Pro/INTRALINK allows only one Organization, in the future, if you upgrade to PDMLink, your company could very likely create additional organizations that will have different business configuration rules. So, instead of having to reapply all of your business settings, it is best to perform the configurations in the most granular context possible.

In future posts, I'll delve into additional methods of system and business administration. If you have any topics that you'd really like to see, please let me know in the Administration section of the Forums. In the meantime, the 'bibles' of Administration for Pro/INTRALINK are the Windchill System Administrator's Guide and the Windchill Business Administrator's Guide. Print out copies and take them with you to the beach for some light summer reading. ;-)

Thanks for reading - more to come soon.
Joe Ferrante
Development Manager PTC