This README file contains the latest information about installing Productivity Center user interface as well as information that was not available for our printed publications.
This file includes the following information:
2.0 Installing the Productivity Center User Interface
3.0 Customizing the Productivity Center User Interface
The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides an integration point for storage management and replication. The Productivity Center user interface allows storage administrators to launch IBM TotalStorage Open Software Family products, which can help to support managing the storage volume lifecycle, device configuration, performance, replication, storage network fabric, zoning, topology, alerts, data backup, data availability, and data recovery, as well as enterprise policies for managing host, application, database, and filesystem data. The Productivity Center user interface is designed to simplify storage administration by providing a task-based organization to the broad range of capability available with the TotalStorage Open Software Family products.
Productivity Center user interface requires Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP Professional.
You can install Productivity Center user interface by running the setup.exe program.
You should have at least one of the following GUI clients installed on the same machine as the Productivity Center user interface:
See the installation documentation for those products for information on how to install these GUI clients and for additional installation requirements. These products may also require separate server components to be installed and configured.
The first time you start a launched program, the location of the program is determined. If the program has an installed executable in the Windows(R) environment, it will be found and launched directly. If the program is browser-based, you will be asked to provide the URL (which will be saved and used for subsequent launches). If the program is not found, a message will be shown.
After being discovered, the installation locations of the launched programs are stored in the extension properties files described in the next section.
Productivity Center provides the capability for third-party vendors to add their own launchable application to the Productivity Center user interface. The vendor needs to provide a properties file and a "launcher" program. The launcher program is an executable program that the launchpad will invoke that knows how to launch the management application. Launching can be starting another executable or opening a Web page. The key to the support is the properties file specification.
Each Productivity Center user interface application must have a separate properties file located in the executable path as follows: com/ibm/storage/launchpad/resources/extensionN.properties. "N" must be an integer value starting at 0. Any number of extension applications can be specified as long as sequential "N" values are used. That is, if there are 4 extension applications, the properties files must be named:
extension0.properties extension1.properties extension2.properties extension3.properties
The basic format of the content of the extension file is as follows:
[product]
product.title=String to be used as the application title on the interface
product.description=String to be used as the description of the product on the interface
product.icon=The name of graphic file to be used as the icon on the interface. The graphic
file must be in a path relative to the execution path for the productivity center
user interface executable. The main launchpad application will use a default
icon if this is not specified or cannot be found.
product.exepath=The program that will be invoked when the extension application is selected.
The program must be in the same execution path as the productivity center executable.
The application will prompt the user for the launcher executable if this value is not
specified or cannot be found.
Here is a sample extension file with the name extension0.properties
[PartnerProduct] PartnerProduct.title = Vendor Extension 1 PartnerProduct.description = Description of the product. PartnerProduct.icon = ./images/otherProd1_16.gif PartnerProduct.exepath = LaunchTest
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