InfoLibrarian Corporation™ Frequently Asked Questions

Company Questions

How long has InfoLibrarian™ been around?, Where are you located?

15 Years, The InfoLibrarian™ product was first introduced in 1998 with the most recent release of 4.1.2R2 in August 2012, 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 and has offices in Eastern Canada and Florida. InfoLibrarian™ is a privately funded corporation.

See Company Info for more information about InfoLibrarian™ and our clients.

How many employees do you have?

In addition to our core team of business management individuals, founders, and IT professionals, InfoLibrarian Corporation™ has an international ecosystem of professional experts, consultants, field engineers and partner companies to meet the needs required for small, medium and enterprise engagements.

Product General Questions

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.

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.

What are the main benefits or advantages in the InfoLibrarian Appliance™ approach vs. the software approach?

• The Appliance is a turn-key solution that fits most environments or scenarios.
• Pre-configured and ready to go out of the box.
• Capital expense (Being hardware, leasing also available).
• Easier to support, because its a standard configuration.
• Plug and play.
• Scales easily by adding appliances.
• No software to configure.

Regarding the appliance solution and the software solution, are the functionalities of the adapters 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 built into the appliance.

What is the difference between the the Metadata Integration Appliance™ and the Search Appliance™?

The InfoLibrarian Search Appliance™ is low cost solution targeted specifically for document indexing and searching, whereas the InfoLibrarian Metadata Appliance™ is an enterprise metadata management solution. However the metadata appliance is also bundled with the same search technology as the search appliance.

Scanning and Adapters Questions (Questions about capturing metadata from and documenting 3rd party tools)

How do the Adapters work?

Each adapter can be used for many scans in a wizard like fashion. The Universal adapters are part of the framework and the actual adapter 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 adapters from the master templates. However, out-of the box, the universal adapters and our pre-built adapters are perfect for most scenarios.

Are there any tools that aren't supported ( I didn't see ours in the list )?

The InfoLibrarian OLEDB Universal Adapter™ is typically used for some of the less popular sources that support OLEDB As we have Native adapters for SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle. Many use the OLEDB adapter as a template that can be customized for scanning many different OLEDB Sources.The Universal OLEDB adapter 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 adapter™, note not all vendors support all those properties, but do support many.

The packages include a choice of adapters, am I able to add more if needed?

Yes, you can add adapters from our list of pre-built ones or create your own using our product.

Can the File adapter collect metadata by scanning unstructured data, such as word documents and source code files?

The file adapter 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

The InfoLibrarian Universal File Adapter™? Can it scan any type of file, or is it limited to a list of file types?

The Universal file adapter 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.

Do file adapters interpret or reverse engineer source code?

No, source code is indexed as unstructured metadata; however the impact analysis feature picks up items like inline SQL, comments and other elements from source code. Additionally the source code is colorized in the portal.

Configuration Questions

What DBMS Platforms does the repository support?

Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 ... any OLEDB Compliant DBMS.

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.

How possible is it to configure the different adapters 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 adapter templates are part of the framework, so you can easily modify an adapter template and create a totally different adapter.

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 Software can be installed and ready to use in less than 1 hour.

Appliance Questions

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.

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, adapter 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.

Can The Hardware be Clustered?

Yes, InfoLibrarian™ Appliances can be clustered up to 32 nodes

Customization Questions

Would I have to know a particular programming language or be somewhat technically inclined to write an adapter?

Yes, in order to code up changes to the adapter template or to create custom adapters you will need to have some knowledge of a programming language. However, InfoLibrarian's API's supports C, C++, Visual Basic, C# .NET and Java. The adapter 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.

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 or BI tool you have that can query an SQL Database.

Can we customize the meta-model?

Yes, InfoLibrarian™ is uniquely capable of handling dynamic model definitions that allow you to support any meta-model structure.

What is involved if I wanted to customize the portal?

The InfoLibrarian Portal™ is open source; therefore you may tweak and or radically customize it. The InfoLibrarian 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.

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, and Asp. The API supports several languages that makes it as easy as possible to customize adapters and to create custom components.