Can Livelink be used for all the documents in the organisation?

[milboa]

We are trying to implement Livelink for all the documents in the organisation. The problem is that Livelink is slower than an ordinary fileserver and the overhead of catalogueing means users are reluctant to use it. Do many organisations use it for all documents or is it really only for specialist applications. Those that have used it for everything, how did you overcome the problems of the slower speed and the manual overheads?

I would be grateful for an answer please as Livelink UK don't seem to be able to give a straight answer and we have been struggling with this for 12 months.

 

[appnair]

We store close to a terrabyte of data in our organization.Slow is a relative term.Livelink will always be slower compared to a no holds barred open web server or file server since the credential checking is either there or a very simple Access Control List(ACL).However livelink is a repository of sensitive information that organizations may have divided amongst groups.But tips to make it perceivably faster
a)One or two folders deep, from the Enterprise workspace need to be permissioned by groups,rather than setting every user to the system at this level.In short if the ACL of any object is shorter the faster it will load.So as more and more user/groups get added these will be added to the enterprise level group.Simple way would be your organization-employees group at the top level.Inside this should be the sub groups employess-HR etc
b)If you are using external file storage it will be almost 300 % faster than an internal storage for LARGE documents.
c)Are you using the benchmarks of OT for your servers,We run quad processors and 2 gig of ram in a load balanced environment.Are your opentext.ini optimized on the number of threads? as specified by OT
d)Is your DB on oracle then ask your DBA whether it is set to run cost vs rule.One of them is faster I don't remeber now.
e)An opentext knowledge base account is must for optimization.You will find tons of info for your org or even you can ask opentext PSO to come a performance audit for yours.They take it seriously when you complain of speed
f)A simple way to understand the stuff that your livelink server is doing is to add the word
WantSummaryTimings=TRUE if it is not there in the section of your opentext.ini under the section that has the WantLogs etc and re-start your server.It will give you a csv file that has timings for each and every action thet athe livelink server is doing .This will give you a clue to what queries take long etc.You import it into excel and do your calc.
g)As a test run the livelink traffic through a different subnet than your existing net see if speeds up stuff .Then it is obviously a contention of traffic in your network.Your network administrator will probably have to be cajoled to do this.








Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi

appnair

 

[appnair]

Here's a livelink guru's wesbiste

http://greggriffiths.org/livelink

.he is in the UK and has several more years of livelink dev and admin experience.See his papers on permissioning etc.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi

appnair

 

[milboa]

Thanks vrey much appnair. We will look into that. Given decent performance would you say that it is desireable to use Livelink for all the documents in an organisation?

 

[appnair]

From our experience our organization has been putting all kinds of information into livelink.Livelink serves as extranet portal,regulatory stuff from contractors,attorneys etc,even plans to use livelink as a records management tool by effective use of categories and attributes.We are 20000 user strong with almost a fourth of them actual contributors in some capacity and the rest performers .All the refineries use livelink workflows for managing their change management processes.However as in any organization people are reluctant to change and it takes some time and training to surpass that.
To me
Pros-Very sturdy code base.Could almost consider this the unix of DMS's
Very easy to write code for livelink in OSCRIPT.Most code is already available but very poorly documented.You will probably spend a day and a half trying to find what you want and write that in less than an hour
Very frustrating for livelink API developers again with poor documentation.Not a black box approach as it expects LAPI devlopers to know GUI livelink,schema etc a whole lot more.In retrospect the LAPI code I used to do could probably be written in less lines in OSCRIPT
Very easy for administartion tasks.Most are well documented practices and you learn as you go
Cons-
Opentext never suggests good practices in taxonomy.Like the scott/tiger database they should provide a taxonomy for the enterprise based on good practices.I have tried creating a loop inside the user/groups creation and is quite possible
The GUI is sometimes confusing with a rich subset of functions when all they want is to open the document.Frontend development should be done by non-developers who are comfortable with Frontpage etc.Most times you have to change a lot of html unless you bought the XML stuff


Have luck and check the KB.


Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi

appnair

 

[milboa]

Thanks appnair,
Are you saying that you need to customise Livelink rather than using it out of the box?

I think I have seen that people can put all their stuff on Livelink if they don't worry about categories etc. The problem is getting people to put in categories etc on a day to day basis and I am not sure the benefits are worth the hassle for them.

The lack of guides to good practice is a headache as you are pretty much left to sink or swim by Opentext, it is like an Opensourc product. If you have any links to good practice that would help a lot please.

 

[appnair]

I haven't actually seen any good taxonomy docs outside of the OT discussion area

https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/llisapi.dll?func=ll&objId=2590780&objAction=view&show=2

this is agood thread if you have access to it

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi

appnair

 

[samarine]

From my about 7 years experience with Livelink:

- avoid writing your own oscript
- avoid asking SP to develop a module for you

Rationale: almost everything can be done with forms, workflow and LAPI.

To simplify use of LAPI I had developed an extra layer (in Java) with objects like Document, Folder, etc.

AS

 

[milboa]

I guess one way of looking at the problem is like this. We want the 200 people in our business division to use Livelink to store and index all their documents so that they can all be easily retrieved by anyone. The problem is that we have not found a model of anyone doing this to see if and how this is possible.

There are organisations that store all their documents in Livelink, but don't do any cataloguing, so don't get great benefit from the software.

Alternatively, there are organisations that have specific processes for some specialist document types, but not for all document types. In some cases there has been a customisation of the process for each document type. This is OK up to a point, but there are limits to what can be done with this approach, particularly as with more general types of documents there would be lots of processes and it would not be clear which one to use.

There is also the question as to whether the overhead of using Livelink is worthwhile for general files or whether it is only useful to catalog some files.

Is there a model for what we are trying to do and how we should go about it please? I have mainly been talking to salespeople who will naturally say that Livelink is marvellous in every possible circumstance, but this is not helping us to move forward at all. Every example I am given that is supposedly just the same as us turns out not to be the same at all.

 

[appnair]

From my experience( 5 yrs as developer,admin) the pros of using livelink
i)The core software has evolved a whole lot
ii)It has a rugged permissions layer albeit unix
iii)it will run on any heterogeneous platform(windows,unix)
iv)Supports Oracle,SQLserver,sybase ?
v)Ample meta data for objects ,I say objects rather than documents.Livelink simply cannot be classified a document management system
vi)Full text search index.
vii)Easy to write reports,scripts using Oscript.
viii)Very easy administration using the livelink GUI.
Cons
i)Try moving anything from development server to production
ii)Try telling a java/vb/c++ programmer/analyst to write some code using the provided lapi documentation
iii)Unless you set your permissions right your novice user will be presented with a multitude of options and can make them quite scared
iv)Overhead of checking permissions on each container for the logged in user may be perceived as slowness of the system

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi

appnair