jtj@apollo.HP.COM (Joseph Jaynes) (09/07/89)
In article <1989Aug29.161420.2016@quintro.uucp> reb@quintro.uucp (Roger E. Benz) writes: > We are currently looking at getting knowledge broker and would like > comments from people who are using it. I am the product team leader for Knowledge Broker, and am happy to have an opportunity to respond to your questions. I'm giving you the perspective of the product developers, of course. Please feel free to contact me directly if you need more information. > I mostly interested in > > 1. How is the speed of the product? Speed depends entirely on your site configuration. Knowledge Broker is a distributed application designed to execute in multi-node networks. It draws much of its power from Apollo's Network Computing System (NCS). If your site has several workstations, you may distribute multiple Knowledge Broker databases across those different machines and search them simultaneously, in parallel. If one or more of those machines happens to be a DN10000, then speed is especially impressive. If your site has only a single workstation, of course, all processing must take place on that machine and performance will be dependent on the capabilities of that machine. > 2. Does it include online Apollo documentation? Yes, Apollo is starting to deliver its own documentation set electronically. The following twelve titles (SR10 versions) are available today in the Knowledge Broker Intro Pack, with more on the way: Retrieving Information with the Knowledge Broker (011270-A01) Administering the Knowledge Broker (014952-A00) Publishing with the Knowledge Broker (014951-A00) Getting Started with Domain/OS (002348-A00) Domain/OS Display Manager Command Reference (011418-A00) Aegis Command Reference (002547-A00) Domain/OS Call Reference (vols. 1-2) (007196-A00/012888-A00) BSD Command Reference (005800-A00) BSD Programmer's Reference (005801-A00) SysV Command Reference (005798-A00) SysV Programmer's Reference (005799-A00) > 3. Is it node locked? No. > 4. Is it easy/hard to add your own information? Apollo also sells the (optional) Knowledge Broker Publisher's Toolkit, which allows you to add your own documents that have been produced in one of three formats: Interleaf TPS, troff, or ascii. A key design feature of Knowledge Broker is its ability to handle native output from a variety of publishing systems rather than forcing you to choose or convert to a single one. We are having discussions with additional publishing software vendors to encourage their adoption of this approach. Which ones are of most interest to you? It is also possible for customer sites to add their own "display modules" to Knowledge Broker to handle specific file formats that only that customer cares about. > 5. Can ASCII terminals use it? Not today, although we have talked about adding such support. The architecture will allow such an extension, but it hasn't been a high priority for us. Should it be? > 6. Disk space usage? The Knowledge Broker release kit containing the twelve fully formatted books listed above requires approx. 45 Mbytes of free disk space, although you can break this apart and distribute it over multiple workstations in a network. You should note that you only need one Knowledge Broker file set per network, not per workstation (although a license is required for each workstation). All nodes in the network access this data, so the disk space requirement on any given user's node is effectively zero. > 7. Other? > > I would also welcome general comments about the prodect. I and the rest of the product team would welcome comments, too! Customer (and potential customer) feedback is invaluable. > > Thanks > > -- > Roger E. Benz Phone = (217) 223-3211 > Quintron Corporation Quincy, Il > UUCP: tiamat!quintro!reb@uunet or quintro!reb@lll-winken > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Jaynes Phone = (508) 256-6600 ext. 2614 jtj@apollo.hp.com Apollo Computer Inc. Chelmsford, MA a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard
weiner@novavax.UUCP (Bob Weiner) (09/09/89)
> We are currently looking at getting knowledge broker and would like > comments from people who are using it. I am the product team leader for Knowledge Broker, and am happy to have an opportunity to respond to your questions. I'm giving you the perspective of the product developers, of course. Please feel free to contact me directly if you need more information. You said so little about KB in your reply? What interesting hypertext capabilities does it have? Can one dynamically create links while viewing documents? How does it compare to other hypertext environments? Does it provide live or hot links (yes, I know data is stored 'in place', but the KB still might need to recompute some data in order to display in a view that meets the user's need)? What is the cost? Is it DM-based or will you make it portable to encourage widespread use? > I mostly interested in > > 1. How is the speed of the product? Speed depends entirely on your site configuration. Here you provided a bunch of 'ifs' and 'buts' yet no data. Compare its retrieval and link following capabilities to other packages. Choose a platform that you feel is available to many people (a DN10000 does not qualify here)? > 4. Is it easy/hard to add your own information? Apollo also sells the (optional) Knowledge Broker Publisher's Toolkit, which allows you to add your own documents that have been produced in one of three formats: Interleaf TPS, troff, or ascii. This doesn't answer the question? How simple/impossible is it to add a link to a TPS microdocument or a graphic frame? key design feature of Knowledge Broker is its ability to handle native output from a variety of publishing systems rather than forcing you to choose or convert to a single one. We are having discussions with additional publishing software vendors to encourage their adoption of this approach. Which ones are of most interest to you? If you read your own marketing information about the KB, 6 months ago marketing made it sound as if documents of virtually any data format are 'easily' linked in to a KB database. Go out into the world and find out how people produce documents and then get cracking. Try Scribe, TeX, MS Word, FrameMaker, the Publisher, Context, etc. > 5. Can ASCII terminals use it? Not today, although we have talked about adding such support. The architecture will allow such an extension, but it hasn't been a high priority for us. Should it be? Yes, in engineering environments terminals are often hooked up to workstations. Those using terminals have no less need to access information. Joe Jaynes jtj@apollo.hp.com Apollo Computer Inc. Chelmsford, MA Thanks for taking the time to help inform the world in a customer-oriented (HP way). -- Bob Weiner, Motorola, Inc., USENET: ...!gatech!uflorida!novavax!weiner (407) 738-2087