THE TWO PLATFORMS Vibe and eDirectory
The Myth of the Blank Sheet
• Once upon a time, software products were written in Assembly or C
• “In my day we coded with a 9volt battery, a paperclip, and a steady hand.”
• Apple thinks it must own every technology that is core to its business.
• Microsoft famously builds their own implementations even for standard software like DNS.
• When machines were simple (i.e. no GUI, no network) and resource constrained (16K memory, 320K floppy disk), building everything from low-level tools made sense.
• Machines are now very complex, and reusing components saves time and adds stability. Nothing Starts with a Blank Sheet Anymore
• Apple
• NeXT created a new OS - NeXTSTEP
• Which Apple bought and to which added some Mac OS compatibility
• And which they later used to build a phone OS
• Which now runs on tablets, watches, and TVs too.
• But that OS used the Mach kernel
• And some drivers from BSD
• With a display system built on Postscript
• And even though NeXT wrote the magic Cocoa libraries
• Those are built on top of Objective-C, which is C plus SmallTalk messaging.
• Microsoft
• OneDrive is Sharepoint
• Sharepoint is SQL Server
• Classroom is Drive, and Gmail, and Google Directory, and Docs, and YouTube and …
• Somewhere in there the MochiKit libraries also come into play. What is this presentation about?
• The Novell bits of Micro Focus are using two systems to build new products:
• Vibe
• eDirectory
• I want to share some details about these efforts
• and also some opinions. (Aside) What’s in a Name?
• Novell
• Attachmate
• (NetIQ / SuSE / Novell / Attachmate)
• Micro Focus
• Wordperfect Office
• Symmetry
• GroupWise
• S-Net
• Netware
• (IntraNetWare)
• ZENworks for Desktops
• ZENworks Configuration Management Brief History of eDirectory
• FLAIM database used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to store family tree data about every single person who has ever lived.
• WordPerfect Office 4 team decides this is good enough to hold e-mail information for an office.
• WordPerfect Office later becomes GroupWise
• Novell Directory Services 8 team abandons RECMAN for FLAIM based on GroupWise experience.
• Later they rename the product to eDirectory
• DirXML provides Identity Management from an eDirectory store.
• Later becomes Identity Manager
• Access Manager, 3.x based on eDirectory, replaces iChain (2.x) and Border Manager
• eDirectory Version number gets stuck on 8 no matter how major the change.
• 8.8.6 - Leaving platforms (NetWare)
• 8.8.8 - Completely rewriting obituary handling
• Version 9 coming this year. Brief History of Vibe
• Began life as DEC / AltaVista Forums
• Written using TCL
• Search powered by AltaVista
• Reached version 8.1
• Spun off into a separate company
• Renamed IceCore
• Renamed Sitescape
• Open Source Version Released as Kablink
• Bought in 2008 by Novell
• Renamed Teaming
• Conferencing added
• Cobranded as Vibe (OnPrem) with the Pulse Product based on Google Wave
• Google Wave and Pulse, Conferencing dropped, Vibe 3.x continues alone.
• 4.0 released last year
• And how did this become a platform?
• One moment … Built on Vibe
• Vibe
• Filr
• iPrint Appliance (Half) Built on eDirectory
• eDirectory
• Open Enterprise Server
• Identity Manager
• Access Manager
• Cloud Manager
• iPrint Appliance (Other Half) Not Built on Either
• GroupWise
• ZENworks
• Messenger
• Non-Novell Heritage Products Micro Focus / Attachmate Product Goals
• The days of building the pyramids are over.
• They died with ZCM.
• Sell to a wider customer base.
• That means selling to Microsoft shops and supporting Active Directory.
• Move away from the end-to-end Novell model.
• “Novell lost”
• Break apart larger products to make new products with a clean subset of functionality.
• Preferably appliances The Wars to Come
• Microsoft shops are migrating away from Microsoft to the Cloud.
• Meaning Google, and others.
• Microsoft would like them to move vertically to O365.
• Can we offer cloud-like experiences internally?
• Products that handle large complex organizations a la “The Novell Way” are in short supply.
• Do not confuse the lack of end-to-end Novell shops with an absence of demand for the kinds of solutions Novell was good at making.
• Do not create a lowest common denominator solution. “We’re absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We’re going to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st.”
–JWZ, regarding the Netscape 0.9 beta “When I hear ‘Neutron’, the first word that comes to mind is ‘bomb’.”
–Tom Anstey The Filr Debacle Development Process
• Translating the slides of the Neutron product to a Brainshare demo reel was hard enough.
• But making the demo reel into a product was impossible.
• We hear folk tales about NCP clients and teams being moved between Bangalore and Provo.
• When Filr finally appeared as a beta in December 2012 it looked suspiciously like Vibe …
• At Brainshare in March 2013 it was announced it would be shipping in April
• And it did
• On April 30
• And from that point onwards, when an appliance was seen one could assume that Vibe was in the mix somewhere. A Note on Geography
• The eDirectory team originated in Provo
• Migrated to Bangalore
• With encryption pieces in California.
• The Vibe team originated in Boston
• Where the core remains
• With some in California
• And now some pieces in Provo
• Probably Bangalore too.
• The size of the Filr team means a lot of people became familiar with it. What You Get With eDirectory
• Hierarchically-structured (Tree) data
• X.500 Encryption infrastructure (CA, SSL, etc.)
• Replication and Partitioning
• Fine-grained authentication and authorization based on users native to the system
• Tested Scalability
• Strong Data Types
• Built-In Backup Tools
• Tracing
• Universal (LDAP) and Proprietary (NDAP) programming interfaces
• NCP network protocol
• iManager framework for administration console
• All the standard features of a good DB - transactions, roll forward logs, indexes, checksumming, cross-platform, caching, recovery, etc. What You Get With Vibe
• Flexible, Responsive Web Interface
• Common collaborative schemes and workflow capabilities built-in
• Mature data models for multiple forms of online collaboration.
• Hierarchy and user rights built into data model.
• Secure, fast search indexing via Lucene
• Closest thing to Gmail search model in an onPrem solution.
• WSDL/SOAP and REST file sharing
• WSDL/SOAP and REST API for mobile apps and integration with other server applications (GroupWise client and calendaring)
• User compatibility with any LDAP directory (eDir, AD, OpenLDAP) Disadvantages of eDirectory
• Underlying mechanisms are complex when problems arise.
• No native web interface for users.
• FLAIM architecture not revisited since 1990s.
• Reads much, much faster than writes.
• Not built for free text.
• Not built for mathematical operations.
• APIs difficult to call from most platforms. Disadvantages of Vibe
• JavaScript functions fragile when underlying state changes compared to other JavaScript-heavy solutions.
• Data model does not handle bad, missing data very well
• Restore is “rip and replace”
• Bad data causes page load to crash.
• Reindexing causes data to disappear in user interface.
• Data model depends on external, 3rd-party SQL database.
• And SQL is not the answer to every problem.
• User synchronization is terrible, fragile, and simplistic.
• Ask me about: Paging, no paging, GUIDs, context issues, timeouts.
• Scalability has inherent bottlenecks in database, reindexing, threading of processes.
• API still primitive in operation set.
• Incredibly annoying appliance upgrade process (when used with an appliance). Discerning Platform
• Vibe
• Does it look like Vibe?
• Does it synchronize users using the Vibe synchronization screens?
• Is the administration page a JavaScript layover?
• Does it index? Does the index use Lucene?
• Do any files have ssf in their names?
• Does the database have a lot of SS_ entries?
• eDirectory
• Is iManager present?
• Does troubleshooting involve tracing?
• Does clustering involve pointing towards the first server in the cluster? Some Prejudicial Thoughts
• Both platforms use Tomcat and Java far too much.
• If eDirectory had better programming libraries / APIs and a good web framework it would be an incredibly robust application platform.
• An eDirectory version that could handle “shadow attributes” for another Directory Service would solve the AD and OpenLDAP compatibility issues.
• A Classroom product based on Vibe would be interesting.
• Whatever happened to Conferencing?
• We need greater engagement in the community regarding these platforms and their futures. Conclusion
• Your host has been Johnnie Odom, School District of Escambia County
• Questions?
• Thank You