Though I have started to look at NaturalONE deployment before, I can no longer delay with Natural v9 requiring we move forward with NaturalONE.
We have Natural developers in the US and India - the ones in India work for TCS and not Eaton, and some of the US-based developers work from home. Controlling the installation, configuration and maintenance (fixes, upgrades) on all these devices seems like it could be a nightmare and fraught with issues. Installing Eclipse on a Windows server that we can manage might help with that but seems to take away the ability to work offline - one of the declared benefits of NaturalONE to work locally. A centralized installation also would make workspaces problematic as two people cannot use the same workspace.
If you have architected a solution that works for this scenario, please describe what you did and how you manage a working development environment.
Thanks in advance!
Any input to this topic would be most welcome by me also.
Hi Brian;
How many US based developers are there who work from home?
Hi Steve,
We don’t have more than about a half dozen programmers in the US, but we have around 15 or so offshore in India. We’d add the three DBAs to our installed base… one in the US, one in Canada and one in India.
-Brian
Hi Brian;
So you have less than 25 PCs which have to be synchronized. Give each of the people an identical computer with identical software. Let them know that if they in any way alter the configuration or software, they will be summarily dismissed.
This works (see below); and you probably can get a discount for 25 machines.
I once got a very nice gig because the shop had a similar no-change rule. My predecessor violated the rule (installed some of his own software). This was detected by the person in charge of the hardware & software for the internal network. I was told (two weeks later when I was hired) by other people from the shop that two people showed up and told him to simply leave.
steve
A centralized solution can be used and is being used by several customers. Some use a Citrix shared environment, others use RDP into a shared server. IIRC, the RDP approach doesn’t require any additional setup as the RDP login is unique to each user and Windows assigns each user their own home directory. For Citrix (or any other shared-logon approach), the Eclipse startup needs to be modified so each user gets their own workspace area.
While a centralized solution might prevent offline development, it does enable access to the development environment from different locations, depending on the access options enabled at your enterprise (Citrix is popular for enabling remote workers to access internal resources in a controlled manner, for example).
Enabling the completely offline development experience is a lot of work - you need ways to share test data (and bear in mind the need to protect privacy data!) and coordinate source updates (Git and such like source repositories help here). You may need a local EntireX Broker, RPC servers, Adabas database in addition to your Natural environment.
NaturalONE offers many many benefits and the option for offline development is not, in my personal opinion, a particularly critical one.
Software AG does strongly recommend the adoption of Agile development methodology in conjunction with your migration to NaturalONE. Please feel free to reach out to your Software AG representative to see how we can assist you with this journey.