Friday, September 30, 2011

Tivoli Security for Dummies

I've had the pleasure to work with a very entertaining IT consultant from the Land of Dracula recently. He's as self-deprecating as anyone I think I've ever met and constantly refers to himself as a Dummy. To be fair, he refers to himself as a Dummy when he is working with technology that is new to him - I don't for one minute believe that he is actually a Dummy!

When discussing the Tivoli security products, he would constantly over-state his Dummy credentials and ask me questions such as "How do dummies find out how to set up replication on these LDAPs?"

The standard response of reading the manual would be met by "I can't find the manual, or the manual isn't written for dummies like me. Why can't it be written in a format that dummies can understand."

On this particular issue - he's probably right. There are manuals, there are presentations, there are all sorts of documents scattered across the web but very few of them show a simple step-by-step approach to enabling replication for dummies.

"How does the dummy enable Single Sign On from WebSEAL to ITIM?" he would ask.

Again, there are plenty of documents around, but they haven't really been written for dummies and they are rarely complete!

It got me thinking... Maybe I should write a series of Dummies Guides covering some of the basics of the Tivoli Security suite of software. Of course, I'm sure the publishers of that well known series of guide books would take exception to my use of the word Dummies, so I'd need something else. Maybe "Tivoli Security for Newbies"?

Regardless of the title for the series, it seems like a worthwhile thing to-do as I'm conscious that my blog has become ever more technical as time passes with an assumption that my readers grow up alongside me. Refreshers for those readers would be useful and it may encourage the newbies to as well.

So, with that in mind, I'd like to call upon my readers to suggest topics that could be covered (taking the above two as givens for the start of the series). All topics will be considered!