User Experience Matters--install OpenDS in 5 easy steps
Sunday Oct 12, 2008
I recently moved over to the Directory Services team to take on the Product Line Management position. I had a lot of fun working with the OpenSSO team and I am excited about the great things that team has released into the market place. Another exciting thing about the job change, besides continuing to work with the OpenSSO team as they embed OpenDS as the configuration store in their product, is that I get to work with another team that values the importance of User Experience when building software. Enterprise software for years has promulgated the myth that all that matters is innovation or features within new releases. User Experience has always been an after-thought.
OpenDS has worked hard to promulgate a different approach which puts User Experience at the top of the priority list. You can see this in the installation experience of the software. MySQL builds software with a design guideline Martin Mickos call the "15 minute rule". This is the rule that their enterprise version should be downloaded and installed in 15 minutes or less. OpenDS can beat this by being installed in less than 3 minutes. This is even true when you are allowing OpenDS to generate 2000 simluated Directory Entries. Powerful stuff. Not only do you get a great directory engine up and running quickly but if you are a Developer or QA Engineer you can get going quicker as well.
More to come on the performance data and some of our plans soon. See for yourself how great the User Experience is for OpenDS in the video below:











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