Problem Statement

Today OSS operations and implementation teams are being asked to do more with less.

Specifically Communication Service Providers (CSPs) have fewer administrators for UNIX operating systems, database administrators, and NETeXPERT. Each CSP is different and it may be a conscious decision to invest less or an actual resource shortage issue. Ultimately this lack of resource bandwidth and time impacts the effectiveness of deploying and maintaining NETeXPERT based applications.

To complicate matters demands of consumers are driving the need to manage new next generation services and resources. To manage these resources NETeXPERT rules, methods, and dialogs are required in developing additional Vendor Specific Adapters (VSAs). This work can be queued up impacting the ultimate delivery of the new service, which may result in significant lost opportunity costs for the CSP.

Additionally NETeXPERT rule writers are faced with ever changing environments. Networks are being consolidated through acquisitions, operations centers are shutdown, moved, and consolidated. This places great risk on the OSS experts as new people are brought in and trained on rules and new rule writers are contracted. Rules are accidentally overwritten which may have high cost on the accuracy of Service Assurance and Fulfillment operations.

Finally some NETeXPERT users leverage Concurrent Versioning System (CVS), ClearCase, or some other versioning system, which keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files. These tools cater toward software developers. Unfortunately these tools are not specifically developed for the NETeXPERT rule writer and may lack the workflow as well as NETeXPERT object type (i.e.: Rule, Method, and Dialog) granularity required for rule writers.

Solution

NETeXPERT Version Control Distribution System (VCDS) was designed and developed to aid customers in versioning Events, Rule Methods, and Dialogs as well as deploying these objects from one NETeXPERT system to another. Longview Software decided to start with these three object types because NETeXPERT rule writers modify them the most often and therefore we wanted to first improve efficiencies in these areas which have the most churn.

As in GC this can be leveraged for various use cases where you have one or more system(s). For example VCDS aids versioning of Events, Rule Methods, and Dialogs across regionally distributed systems where changes need to be deployed to one or more remote server(s). Most users will leverage VCDS in the application implementation process to version between development, test, and production servers. By using VCDS, development, test, and product teams sometimes working under time constraints can avoid costly mistakes when rules are overwritten.

For more details on VCDS please see the following blogs: Positioning and ROI.

Add Comments