Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We have had many discussions about this topic over the years and the difficulty has been capturing the questions that we are trying to answer. Mike Roy assembled a group consisting of ITS and Library staff members earleir this year to address this issue. You can read more about this group’s work at http://www.wesleyan.edu/atr/content_management/.During the last couple of meetings, it became obvious that the issues brought to the table by the various groups still remained complex and diverse and our attempt to possibly solve many of the needs with a single solution may not be feasible. What became apparent was that every single group had a plan that required a lot of disk space!

In addition, the issue of trying to manage the fragmented space that is currently available to our community seemed to be one on which we could take some action. For example, today, a faculty member has space on Dragon, condor (for both personal web space, which is different from course web space) and a fileshare space for collaboration with colleagues here and elsewhere. The proposal is to bring all of this together into one space that is easy to understand. The solution also has to be a cross-platform solution so Windows suers, Mac users and the Linux users can all work with it.

The easy part is the acquisition of very large disk space… It is back end technology that a user does not see directly, so the decision involves mainly the technology support services staff. We have already looked at one very good solution from a company called Compellent and are waiting to hear from HP. The decision on this will be made soon. We are talking about some serious disk space here. We may initially acquire 20-25 TB, but we are sizing units which can easily be expanded.

We want to proceed on “logically” consolidating the space available to faculty. The two major requirements here are:

• It must be easy to use. One of the suggestions is that it appears as a drive on their desktop with a very simple hierarchy.
• The user must be able to control access easily and doesn’t have to rely on ITS staff every time they need to do this.

We looked at a cross-platform software solution from Xythos. It is a very impressive software and is entirely based on the WebDAV protocol. Basically all file management from the desktop takes place over the http:// or https:// protocol and the software hides many of this in a way that the user may feel that they are working with a mounted drive. Access control can be done through the web and notifications of sharing is handled via email. A tomcat server manages all requests and security is maintained in database tables. They support most of the common database platforms.

We plan to look at a couple of more solutions before making a decision.

Here are some of my observations:

• These solutions are very expensive.
• They are proprietary, so any commitments we make are for the long haul.
• A clear plan to migrate the existing content to the new system, preserving all the security settings must be discussed before we commit to any software.
• It is not clear how many members of the community will actually take advantage of all the feature set of these software – this is certainly important in deciding if we want to commit valuable dollars to such a software.
• Having spent all of these resources, we would want to convert all users to use this. Whereas this may look trivial, in the end it may not. We need to explore this carefully by including representative users from various departments in the evaluation process. I know that several administrative departments have elaborate ways in which they use Dragon today.
• Whereas giving the power of access control to the end user is very appealing (and I support it whole heartedly), we should also be aware of the pitfalls. The file access may be inadvertently be opened up to users that should not have access. This can especially be dangerous if it happens in the administrative departments.
• This would require changes to the way we currently do business – all file management MUST go through this system for things to work. Some users cannot say that they prefer to sftp their files, for example.
• So, while we go through this process, we should ask ourselves if there is something we can do to address the questions on this topic, or is there a public domain software that can do the job.

I invite you to chime in… Don’t be shy. This is very important and is likely to affect all of us, so it is better that we discuss the issues and find the right solution.