Day 13
The latest version of Sterling Commerce’s FileAgent is v1.3, and is a welcome release. It has several features that were lacking in the past. Several of these features will come as welcome relief to support staff of large deployments of C:D & FileAgent.
Text configuration file
The first feature of note is that the configuration of FileAgent which is normally stored in a binary .ser file can now also be stored as a text file. This is important especially for support staff as there maybe many many rules and finding the rule that applies a certain pattern match may be difficult if the name of the rule is not a good clue. Searching the text configuration can be a lot quicker that hunting the various levels of the configuration using the GUI.
However, please note that this textual representation of the binary .ser configuration file is not something that can then be used to generate a binary .ser file. It is more akin to documentation.
If you have chosen to save the configuration as text, then FileAgent will keep the textual configuration and the binary .ser in sync.
Sterling Control Center
FileAgent can now be monitored by Sterling Control Center (SCC). This is done by configuring both the FileAgent to send SNMP traps when there is a problem and SCC to receive them, and to be notified of the problem. This is another feature which will please the support teams.
Dynamic Configuration
In previous versions of FileAgent any change to the configuration meant having to stop/re-start the FileAgent which was usually an inconvenience. in this version of FileAgent you can choose whether the saved configuration file will be noticed by FileAgent when it has been modified and the new configuration activated immediately. This feature will be valuable where FileAgent is kept very busy due to the volume of new files to process.
Sub-directory watching
In previous versions of FileAgent all sub-directories of the watch directories would be scanned for candidate files. If you did not want this to happen you had to include the path of the watch directory in your rules with a pattern to match only those files found in that directory only. Now in the new version you can choose whether you want that functionality or if you prefer you can disable it.
This is a useful feature as too many directories may be scanned constantly unnecessarily. This can happen if staff unaware of how FileAgent works start creating archive directories under the watch directories. In this case FileAgent would see the archive files as candidates that match some rule or other and process them accordingly, which is probably not what you intended.
Conclusion
I have yet to try out this latest version of FileAgent, but I look forward to seeing these new features put to good use.
I’ll keep you posted as I learn more from using this latest version.
The latest version of Sterling Commerce’s FileAgent is v1.3, and is a welcome release. It has several features that were lacking in the past. Several of these features will come as welcome relief to support staff of large deployments of C:D & FileAgent.
Text configuration file
The first feature of note is that the configuration of FileAgent which is normally stored in a binary .ser file can now also be stored as a text file. This is important especially for support staff as there maybe many many rules and finding the rule that applies a certain pattern match may be difficult if the name of the rule is not a good clue. Searching the text configuration can be a lot quicker that hunting the various levels of the configuration using the GUI.
However, please note that this textual representation of the binary .ser configuration file is not something that can then be used to generate a binary .ser file. It is more akin to documentation.
If you have chosen to save the configuration as text, then FileAgent will keep the textual configuration and the binary .ser in sync.
Sterling Control Center
FileAgent can now be monitored by Sterling Control Center (SCC). This is done by configuring both the FileAgent to send SNMP traps when there is a problem and SCC to receive them, and to be notified of the problem. This is another feature which will please the support teams.
Dynamic Configuration
In previous versions of FileAgent any change to the configuration meant having to stop/re-start the FileAgent which was usually an inconvenience. in this version of FileAgent you can choose whether the saved configuration file will be noticed by FileAgent when it has been modified and the new configuration activated immediately. This feature will be valuable where FileAgent is kept very busy due to the volume of new files to process.
Sub-directory watching
In previous versions of FileAgent all sub-directories of the watch directories would be scanned for candidate files. If you did not want this to happen you had to include the path of the watch directory in your rules with a pattern to match only those files found in that directory only. Now in the new version you can choose whether you want that functionality or if you prefer you can disable it.
This is a useful feature as too many directories may be scanned constantly unnecessarily. This can happen if staff unaware of how FileAgent works start creating archive directories under the watch directories. In this case FileAgent would see the archive files as candidates that match some rule or other and process them accordingly, which is probably not what you intended.
Conclusion
I have yet to try out this latest version of FileAgent, but I look forward to seeing these new features put to good use.
I’ll keep you posted as I learn more from using this latest version.
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