I have been asked to provide some evaluation comments regarding the use of 'ROACCESS' at the Telstra Corporation.  Initial comments will represent a User of the ROACCESS product (myself), other more technical comments will follow that represent the observations of the Rochade Technical Developer at Telstra (Mr Terry Luk). 

For your information, Telstra is Australia's largest Telecommunications company with over 60,000 employees, it achieved a profit last financial year of  $2.3 Billion (AUS).   Telstra is currently an Australian Government owned Corporation but it will be undergoing a partial 
privatisation ( A third to be privatised) over the next few months. 

The area in Telstra that I work for is called the Corporate Data Management Group and I am the Manager of the IRM (Information Resource Management) function within that Group.  CDM is required to maintain SYSTEMS PROFILE information on more than 1000 Systems within Telstra, store information on the PRODUCTS that Telstra market as well as a CORPORATE DATA ARCHITECTURE that is being developed to be used as tool 
to rationalise, integrate and map a direction for all future systems development at Telstra. 

To handle this complexity we purchased the Repository known as ROCHADE which is developed and marketed by Viasoft Pty Ltd.  Basically because Telstra has invested in the Rochade Repository and its suite of add-ons, it was important that the Business was able to view that investment via a Company-wide Intranet.  ROACCESS was able to satisfy this requirement and provide information and visibility to the Rochade Repository.  At 
the same time Viasoft were unable to offer an alternative to Web Access for Rochade that was not at least months away from being available. 

My experiences using the ROACCESS Intranet front end to Rochade have all been positive.  The Product is flexible and customisable.   If you ask is the product perfect - then my answer would be no.  Its front end tends to be a bit 'klunky' and 'confusing' to new users but this is soon resolved with training.  Its major weakness is a lack of  support for path reports\procedure reports or queries from Rochade.  The developer is aware of this weakness and is actively pursuing a strategy to solve it. 

Turnaround times on enhancements to ROACCESS by Dennis Simpson of AUGUST Computing Inc have always been prompt.   Where the enhancement has been complex, Dennis Simpson has kept us briefed on at least a weekly basis of its progress.   Dennis has always been exceptionally helpful in providing information and advice.  He is always willing to accomodate user requested changes to his product in such a way that it does not compromise the overall 'generic' version of ROACCESS. 

I need to make readers aware that we discovered ROACCESS by 'surfing the net' on the topic called 'ROCHADE', in fact the development team have NEVER met Dennis Simpson in person,  90% of our dealings with him have been via Email - the IRM Group have only spoken with him ONCE on the phone !!  We are located at least 12000 miles from the US and  have been completely satisfied with the level of service that August Computing 
have been able to provide to us.   Dennis is nearly always able to respond to one of our emails within 24 hours of receiving it. 

However, there is one issue that you need to be aware of.   The use of the ROACCESS & the Rochade UNIX Batch Client in browse mode means that you can have significantly more individuals browsing the repository than you have UNIX Batch Client licences. The reason is that in browse mode a licence is checked out only for the period of the query and most queries have sub-second response times.  The Viasoft Company is aware that we are using ROACCESS, and they are trying to develop a marketing strategy based on Concurrent Users (5 licences means only 5 browsers) instead of Concurrent Accesses (5 licences >> 5 browsers).  Basically Viasoft are not happy with the capacity of ROACCESS using the UNIX Batch Client to enable more virtual accesses than there are licences that have been purchased for the UNIX Batch Client. 

Regards 

Dennis Evans 
IRM Manager 
Corporate Data Management 
IT Strategy & Direction 
Customer, Process and Information 
Network Technology Group 
Telstra Corporation 

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The following is a summary of the technical aspects abouts RO-ACCESS and 
should be useful  for evaluation. (Provided by Mr Terry Luk). 

ROCHADE does not have native support for WEB access up to this moment 
and RO-ACCESS is a tactical solution to address this deficiency by using 
ROCHADE batch client and CGI (with perl).  This is the most commonly 
used architecture as the first generation of Repository/web integration. 
It is easy to implement and portable across platforms. 

In our installation, 

 - We run two Rochade 5.0e servers  in an HP9000/720 machine with 
96Mbytes memory using HP-UX 10.20 (development and production) 
 - The WEB components Apache 1.1, Perl 5.002, RO-ACCESS and Rochade Unix 
batch client are also installed and run in the same machine.  (N.B. 
Although this has not been tested, we believe these components should be 
able to run in a separate machine to distribute the loading and hence 
multiple WEB servers can be configured in an Enterprise environment to 
access the same repository.) 
 - We had used ro-access version 0.9, 3.1 and 4.0 since April. 
 - We can use multiple ro-access versions at any one time.  This is 
useful for testing new versions before it is put into production. 
 - Username and Password are used to control access for all users.  We 
use ROCHADE userclass and all sort of profiles to control data access so 
that different group has 
     - different set of item types 
     - different view on the same item types 
     - different access such as read, create, delete, rename item 
 All these are supported by version 4.0. 

RO-ACCESS details 
 - It contains 40 perl scripts and some other supporting files.  They 
are well-structured and can be customized easily to handle local 
requirements. 
 - A number of options or parameters can be defined in a configuration 
file.  This includes the number of rochade servers, the path of the 
batch client, number of items allowed, option to display timestamp, etc. 
 - rochade commands is embedded in perl and compiled during execution 
and hence no need to import any procedures to rochade during software 
installation and upgrade. 

Our usage 
 - RO-ACCESS allows us to start with small size server and to deploy 
access to the repository nationally very easily as intranet access is 
available in everybody's desktop computer. 
 - RO-ACCESS allows the user to drill down to all items and their 
references as hyper links are defined for every items shown on the 
screen.  We also define links to other document such as MS Word, MS 
Powerpoint, GIF in all WEB servers in the company. 
 - We extend RO-ACCESS to provide user views such as IT, BUSINESS, 
DB2-DEVELOPER, ORACLE-DEVELOPER for easy access to our Corporate RIM, 
and to restrict users to use update mode based on user definition stored 
in ROCHADE. 

Performance 
 - Average transaction response is 2 seconds in our machine.  It will be 
much faster with an average size UNIX server. 

Some limitations 
 - ROCHADE AUTOPILOT lacks a very friendly and powerful report facility 
and we have to develop a GUI to fulfil our requirements.  RO-ACCESS has 
similar limitations in earlier versions.  Path Report has been added 
recently and we would expect RO-ACCESS will be further enhanced in this 
area to include reports links 
   - selection by value attributes, link attributes, 
   - support multiple conditions, 
   - select attributes to be reported, 
   - use multiple seed items, etc 
 - Both the CGI approach and the Rochade Unix batch client are not very 
scalable in terms of WEB/Repository integration.  However, there are no 
other solutions available in the current mark. 
 - Embedding rochade commands in perl can be a disadvantage as 
compilation is required for each request. 
 

Thank you for your kind attention. 

Regards, 
Terry Luk 
 

Thank you.  I've been asked another person about ro-access and whether I 
will recommend it.  I said I will.  The remarks I gave are: 

There are basically three approach to the Web solution: 
1. Wait for Viasoft 
2. Build your own 
3. Buy something like ro-access and then customise further 

The first one may be too long and you will miss the opportunities to 
address business needs.  The second would not be viable unless you have 
several well experienced rochade + web experts. 

I hope you every success with the ro-access. 

Regards, 
Terry