Introduction

Livelink-Experts.com is a web community dedicated to the applications and solutions built on and by the Open Text ECM Suite that was formerly known as "Livelink". It provides a place for Experts to gather and talk amongst themselves, promote and advertise themselves and the companies they work for, and a place for people to go who are looking for Livelink Experts and expertise. It differs from the many broad-based social media communities in it's dedication to the topic of Livelink as well as some very high-value applications members of the community enjoy the use of.

Livelink-Experts.com is built from the web community platform provided by GATE Village which uses the Drupal Content Management system as it's base. This public information discusses the creation of a small suite of high-value applications specific to the performance and scaling of a Livelink Enterprise Server (aka Open Text Content Server) based application or solution. We tentatively call this the Online Livelink Performance Suite that is currently made up of the Usage Profile Data Generator, the Usage Profile Scenario Description, and the Livelink Thread & TPS Calculator. These three related tools

1. Provide a way to collate and summarize the light-weight performance data generated by Livelink called "Summary Timings" (comma-separated-value files generated by the Livelink server when so instructed) stored within a DB; also allow for the adjustment/modification of the summarized data.
2. Provide a way of describing the physical and virtual environment (whether real or imagined) used to collect and model the data, for instance the number of accounts on the system and the amount of resources required to meet predicted 'bursty' activity.
3. Provide a secure, interactive calculator pre-populated with the results of step 2 that will indicate the amount of Livelink threads required to meet the average peak load and the predicted burst activity for a given workload and number of users

The Online Livelink Performance Suite must work within an online community that supports role-based access control, an e-commerce store, social media tools and integration, and an advertising system. It is the marketing draw to the for-profit community.

Ironically, the Online Livelink Performance Suite is not built on top of any Open Text software in that there are a few point solutions within the Open Text ECM Suite that would seem to compete in this space. In fact, however, while the Open Text ECM Suite is chalk full of value for those looking for an Enterprise Content Management system, it is very old-school in the way that it approaches content management (as befits their market). While certainly Livelink (as we affectionately call it) is a very capable Turing Machine that could be made to do anything Livelink-Experts.com might ask of it, there are many places that are more like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Read on for an indepth discussion of the modules' capabilities, the rapid development of these modules within the GATE Village environment, the helper modules that allows it all to work, and the future of the tools. Eventually we hope to be able to provide a reasonable description of what it might take to mimic the Online Livelink Performance Suite using the Open Text ECM Suite