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InfoLibrarian Frequently Asked Questions
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Company Questions
 How long has InfoLibrarian been around?, Where are you located? |
10 Years, The InfoLibrarian Product was first
introduced in 1998 with the most recent release
of 4.1.2 and the Metadata Appliance in the
spring of 2005 and the InfoLibrarian Search
Appliance in the Fall 2005. InfoLibrarian
Corporation is currently headquartered in
Rochester New York, USA. With offices in Eastern Canada and Florida. InfoLibrarian is a
privately funded corporation.
See
 Company
Info for more information about InfoLibrarian and our clients.
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Enterprise Capabilities
| How well does the product scale, how many users? |
Our products have been proven in the most demanding
of environments and provide Enterprise Class
scalability to thousands of users and the capability
to scan millions of artifacts. The repository
can scale to terabytes. The Software
and Appliance is cluster enabled and can be configured
to run on up to 32 nodes
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| How can we remain up and running if there is a hardware failure on the appliance and we are waiting for a replacement? |
COB
Continuity of
Business or redundant configurations can be easily
accomplished by purchasing a Dual Appliance configuration.
This configuration can be implemented in a
warm stand bye, or load
balanced and fail over cluster configuration. Although
under most scenarios, the appliances can
quickly and easily be swapped out in the
unlikely event a hardware failure should occur.
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| How do I backup my data on the Appliance? Or do I need to? |
Not
Required. The metadata Integration Appliance is a
true Middleware (SOA) device, both
the repository data, Scanner configurations and the indexes
are stored on your external DBMS,
NAS or SAN. Therefore you should not store
any specific data on the appliance itself.
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| Can The Hardware be Clustered? |
Yes, InfoLibrarian Appliances can be clustered up to 32 nodes.
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Product
Packages Questions
| What is the difference between the Software and the Metadata Integration Appliance? |
The Metadata Integration Appliance is a Turn-Key solution with additional
features for real-time monitoring, ease of support and value for most enterprise
scenarios as site licensing is included. Additionally, the appliance was
designed to perform in demanding environments with redundancy and scalability
built into the architecture. The Software and Appliance is cluster enabled and
can be configured to run on up to 32 nodes.
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| What are the main benefits or advantages in the InfoLibrarian Appliance approach vs. the Universal Software approach? | |
| Regarding the Appliance solution and the Universal Software solution, are the functionalities of the scanners the same? |
They are Identical, the Software gives you more
flexibility if you desire to utilize your own
hardware for your solution. With the Exception of the document indexing and Real time monitoring and management capabilities
build into the appliance.
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| What is the difference between the the Metadata Integration Appliance and the Search Appliance? |
The Search Appliance is low cost solution targeted specifically for document
indexing and searching, whereas the Metadata Appliance is an enterprise metadata
management solution. However the Metadata Appliance is also bundled with the
same search technology as the search appliance.
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Scanning and Scanners Questions
| How do the Scanners Work? |
The
way they work is this. Each scanner can be used
for many scans in a wizard like fashion. The
Universal scanners are part of the framework and the actual scanner source
templates are provided with the product giving you
the ability to modify them for specific purposes.
In essence you can actually create unlimited
custom scanners from the master
templates.However, out-of the box, the universal scanners and
our pre-built scanners are perfect for most scenarios
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| Are there any DBMS's that aren't supported ( I didn't see ours in the list )? |
The
OLEDB Universal Scaner is typically used for some of the
less popular sources that support
OLEDB As we have Native scanners for SQL Server, DB2,
Oracle etc.Many
use the OLEDB Scanner as a template that can be
customized for scanning many different OLEDB
Sources.The
Universal OLEDB Scanner will scan metadata from
any OLEDB compliant source and returns the
metadata that the providerhas
implemented support for within their OLEDB Driver.
In Most cases you will get tables, columns, views,
procs or even more.This link shows what metadata is captured from the
Universal OLEDB Scanner, note not all vendors
support all those properties,but
do support many.
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| The packages include a choice of 3 scanners, am I able to add more if needed? |
Yes, you can add scanners
from our list of pre-built ones or create your own
using our
product.
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| Can the File Scanner collect metadata by scanning unstructured data, such as word documents and source code files? |
The file scanner is perfect
for source code. We have other functionalities in
the product that allow you to index unstructured
metadata by either linking documents or actual
indexing of Word, PDF etc for search. Similar in
Internet search engines and supports hundreds of
document types. See this link
Search Appliance
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| The Universal File Scanner? Can it scan any type of file, or is it limited to a list of file types? |
The
Universal file scanner scans files of any type,
and captures metadata and file contents. The
template can be customized to perform special parsing of certain
file types if required. You can specify file types
and other folder crawling options for each scan
you perform.
By
default, the entire text of the files you scan are
fully indexed in the meta-mart, therefore you can
perform keyword and impact analysis
against scanned files
immediately after scanning. However, sometimes you
may wish to customize them slightly to a specific
need you may have.
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Configuration Questions
| What DBMS Platforms does the repository support? |
Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 ... any OLEDB Compliant DBMS
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| Can each solution run in a Windows, Linux or any other platform comfortably? |
Comfortably
is a big word, And realistically there are
several unknowns when dealing with this scenario.
When dealing with multiple platforms, J2EE
versions etc, issues are not uncommon. Also note
that in more situations than not, many IT
professionals have no option but to configure
third party software on servers that are running
several other applications, services etc. We
highly recommend the Appliance in such an
environment.
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| How possible is it to configure the different scanners to perform detailed and environment specific jobs? |
InfoLibrarian comes
with an Auto-Scanner that automates the scan
scheduling etc.
Its
quite robust with real-time monitoring. Note that
the repository also supports the keeping of
history (Metadata Mart), this is very powerful for
impact analysis and comparing of changes over
time.
The
Actual scanner templates are part of the
framework, so you can easily modify a scanner
template and create totally different
scanner.
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| How long does it take to fully configure the product? |
InfoLibrarian can be fully configured and up and running within a day.
Both the Appliances are true plug and play. The Sofware can be installed and ready to use
in less than 1 hour.
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Customization Questions
| Would I have to know a particular programming language or be somewhat technically inclined to write a scanner? |
Yes, in order to code up changes to the scanner
template or to create custom scanners you will
need to have some knowledge of a programming
language. However, InfoLibrarian's API 's supports
C, C++, Visual Basic and Java. The scanner
templates are very easy to use and in some cases
we have even trained non-programmers to make the
necessary changes they need. For
Non-Programmers, we provide an Excel Metadata Loader template that contains a
simple macro that you can manipulate to load
metadata from different sources.
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| Can I create my own customer reports through the web manager that report on the resource usage information found? |
Yes, and you can do that using any reporting tool
you have that can query an SQL
Database.
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| What is involved if I wanted to customize the portal? |
The InfoLibrarian Portal is open source, therefore you may tweek and or radically customize it.
The Administrator provides several portal builder tools to visually customize the portal.
Usually a simple HTML Editor will be all you'll need to make changes to the portal in your environment.
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| What is the level of difficulty in creating customizations to your product? |
Reports can be easily created using standard SQL. Portal
changes can be made using Java, HTML, Asp etc. And
the API Supports several languages that makes it
as easy as possible to customize scanners and to
create custom components.
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The Appliance is a Turn-key Solution that fits most environments or scenarios
