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Production installation of the IBM Sales Center client
It is expected that production use of Sales Center will involve anywhere from tens to thousands of clients, and the enterprise needs a scalable and repeatable way to distribute and update WED4WL, Sales Center, and their own customizations. This document provides our recommendations for that activity, exploiting capabilities in Windows, Eclipse, and the management capabilities built into WED4WL.
Automation of this process requires additional software available from IBM, external parties, or eclipse.org. It also requires an amount of set-up, including installing and configuring management and software distribution servers; we assume that this activity is spread over a sufficient number of clients that automation is attractive. Otherwise, manual installation is recommended.
Production install is performed in two stages. First, the base image consisting of Windows XP plus an initial load of client software is installed. The client is then deployed and further provisioned with the balance of the client application (if any), using one of the supported automated software distribution mechanisms. Over the lifetime of the client, updates and additional features are installed using the same automated mechanisms.
It is a customer design decision where to draw the line between the initial load of client software that happens before client deployment, and the further provisioning that happens after. The competing factors that contribute to this decision are:
- The initial load must include a minimal enabling software for the post deployment provisioning. What this enabling software consists of depends on the provisioning method.
- Initial load can require a significant set up effort that is repeated for each choice of initial load content. This argues that the initial load should contain only components that are relatively stable and common to all supported configurations, to minimize the number of times the setup must be performed.
- If post-deployment provisioning involves a low bandwidth channel, or a channel whose bandwidth is already committed to high priority business function, it is advantageous to make the initial load as complete as possible. In the extreme, the initial load may contain all software necessary for a fully functioning client, and the post-deployment provisioning only applies updates to portions of the client that have changed since the initial load image was created.
- If the deployed client has a high bandwidth channel to the provisioning server it is possible to deploy bare hardware and perform both the initial load and subsequent provisioning at the deployment site. This method is also useful to re-image in the field a client that has been corrupted.
Related concepts
Deploy customizations to the IBM Sales Center
Post deployment provisioning mechanisms