While it’s often used as an excuse for laziness, when I apologize for the lack of updates from a blog perspective, I’m going to tell you it’s because I’ve been really busy! As the year comes to an end, I’m fighting the clock on a daily basis trying to stabilize all 4 of the Axway environments (1 production, 1 dev, 1 QA, and 1 external) at my current gig. Because of some major reliability issues, we were fortunate enough to get assistance from Axway in doing a very large health assessment across our Synchrony platform that included the Gateway, Integrator, and Sentinel components. As a result of the assessment,  a few resolved support cases, and the random bug-fix (corrupt transfer modules and scheduled events), we ended up with a list of a few dozen fixes that ranged in severity from “recommended” to “critical”.

While it is indeed my job as a consultant to go through these types of exercise, there is a lot of this stuff that is just a pain to deal with. What seems like arbitrary corruption in models, VFDs, schedules, etc. The seemingly endless string of hidden settings that are nowhere in training or setup documentation that only come as a result of in depth assessments from the senior-most support analysts at Axway’s French office. The seemingly impossible nature of accurately trying to assess scalability by predicting future file transfer volume and trying to figure out how many Hierarchal Message Processors and Process Engines  to build in Integrator based on the number of messages that may be going through at one time, keeping in mind that you should only user a certain number of these HMPs and PEs based on the number of processors you have.

Again, this is my job. I love doing it, and I love learning all of these ins and outs of a huge software platform. As has become evident by the continued mergers and acquisitions of Axway and the Sopra Group, these guys aren’t going away. The Synchrony platform is the future of transmission and integration software. As such, I’m in permanent sponge mode when it comes to Axway utilities, soaking up as much information as I can and doing my best to document what I do soak up so as to retain as much of it as possible for as long as possible. I need help though. I’m very active on the Axway Forum site hosted at axway.com, the yahoo group sites, the Help With Axway forum site, and most importantly - the soon-to-launch http://www.axwayusergroup.com site.

The big thing here is that I need help. Axway is not going to help in any way with a user operated user group site, which is undoubtedly for the better. When users are in charge, there’s no editing of content. No posts on a forum or articles in a knowledgebase being removed from the site because Axway can’t profit from something if it’s in the hands of users and not PSO. As users, we can wield an enormously powerful tool in a forum for the facilitated sharing of knowledge amongst users. Axwayusergroup.com will be this tool. Why pay for PSO to be on site for a week when any product installation or upgrade can be handled with a checklist and an hour or two of time on the phone with a skilled consultant? Why wait for days, weeks, or even longer for a support case to be resolved when somebody in a live chatroom might be able to resolve it instantly? The biggest asset that users have is,  without a doubt, each other.

I’ve been doing my best to ensure that this new website (thousands of dollars in development and design, countless hours from numerous resources) lets us take the fullest advantage of each other. I know that myself, and a host of others in the user community would like nothing more than to help other users by sharing the knowledge that we’ve gained through expensive training courses, countless hours working with Axway’s Support and Professional Services groups, and the almost inhumane amount of hours that users like myself have put into mastering the Synchrony suite of components. There’s nothing that most of us would appreciate more than finding out about various shortcuts and solutions to our problems the easy way, and there’s not a much better way to show that appreciation than to share the shortcuts and solutions we’ve encountered on our journeys. I’m ready to share mine. Who’s ready to share theirs?

More to follow,

Tony