Harvest Administrator Assistant

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Harvest Administrator Assistant

• Product perspective
• May 2006

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Product opportunity
Computer Associates AllFusion Harvest Change
Manager is one of the leading CM solutions on the
market. While satisfying all needs of
developers, CM administrator tasks are somewhat
neglected, which impacts productivity and ease of
maintenance of the whole system. Harvest
Administrator Assistant purposes to improve and
enhance Harvest administrator user experience.
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Environment management scale
In typical Harvest mid- to large-sized
environments there are hundreds of projects, each
having tens of states and tens of processes
within each state. To estimate number of
entities managed 100 projects 100x10 1,000
states (10 in each project) 1,000x10 10,000
processes (10 in each state) And we are
considering lower-bound estimates without even
taking linked processes into account!
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Environment management problem
Processes are the smallest building blocks of
business logic enforced in Harvest environment.
As we have shown, even middle sized
installation leaves the administrator with 10,000
processes to manage! And enterprise business
logic is dynamic, making change of process
definitions everyday task for CM administrator.
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Current means of process management
To change process definitions, CM administrator
users may use Harvest Administrator application.
While well-suited to handling changes for a
single process, the task of changing access
permissions for 20 processes in different states
of different projects will require significant
time, effort and is quite error-prone (for
example, it takes 11 mouse clicks to perform
access modification for a single process )
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Current means of process management
To decrease time and effort needed to modify
process definitions, CM administrator users often
resort to low-level methods such as direct
database modification using SQL. While fast, the
method is prone to critical errors and requires
steep learning curve.
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The solution
To illustrate how Harvest Administrator Assistant
increases productivity and eliminates errors,
lets have a look at example mentioned before.
To change access definitions of 20 processes
the following steps are required 1) Select
processes to modify by specifying custom filter
on project, state, process properties 2) View and
modify selected processes access list And thats
instead of 200 mouse-clicks required in Harvest
Administrator, saying naught of complicated SQL
queries!
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The features Change processes
Harvest Administrator Assistant tool allows CM
administrators conveniently change process
definitions. User may change process properties
in batches according to her selection,
including Common properties (name, note)
Access list (execute grant/revoke)
Process-type specific properties For
User-Defined Processes (UDP) and Notify processes
extended user-interface is available.
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Process change
Search and select processes to change
Change common properties
Change access properties
Change process type specific properties
and more for UDP/Notify/linked processes
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The features Change processes for linked
processes
It is possible to change linked processes common
properties both by searching parent processes or
by searching for specific linked processes. User
may change linked process properties in batches
according to her selection, including Common
properties (name, note) Process-type specific
properties Extended user-interface for
User-Defined Processes (UDP) and Notify process
types makes changing linked process properties
effortless and convenient.
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Linked process change
Search and select linked processes to change
Change process type specific properties
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The features Create processes
Harvest Administrator Assistant tool allows CM
administrators to create new processes from
definitions of already existing processes. Create
processes from existing process, duplicating
process properties including Process
properties Process access list Linked
processes Users may create both ordinary and
linked processes. It is also possible to create
linked processes from ordinary ones and vs. (for
UDP and Notify processes only)
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Process duplication
Select project, state and process to duplicate
from
Select project and state to duplicate process to
Set duplication advanced parameters
Process definitions duplicated!
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The technology
Harvest Administrator Assistant was developed
using C. on Microsoft .NET platform for
Windows. The data are retrieved and modified by
direct database access using proprietary data
access components, that support range of
databases (currently Oracle only is supported,
Microsoft SQL Server and Ingres are planned in
future releases). Graphical User Interface (GUI)
of the application is consistent with Windows XP
look and feel.
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Supported versions
The Harvest Administration Assistant was
originally developed for Harvest version 5.0. At
the time of release, the product supports Harvest
versions r7 and r7.1 on Oracle database 10g.