For many years the magic of performance analysis of a Open Text Content Server-based solution was the sole purvey of Open Text Global Services and Customer Support -- using a non-integrated set of tools separately developed to solve each independent task, an Open Text technical consultant is able to provide a performance analysis and / or scaling model of an existing or proposed solution. Unfortunately for most Content Server customers, none of the tools are available for free and, in fact, there is virtually no performance tuning tools available for free other than White Papers and the Champion Toolkit papers. It is left as an exercise to the individual customers to read, digest and put that advice to use ... or to purchase a consultant's help in doing so for them.

We do not wish to downplay the important role an Expert can bring, to the contrary, an Open Text Technical Consultant who is an expert at performance and scaling is an extremely valuable and useful resource that all major customers of a Content Server-based solution should utilize at some point early in their deployment. One of the most difficult tasks of any system is in designing for performance and scale when there is very little and inaccurate information to work with and these consultants, or at least the good ones, come with years of experience that brings an intuitiveness that is very difficult to pass on to others.

One should expect that a corporation as large and long-lived as Open Text would have a great deal of performance data from customers that they can call on to be able to accurately model and estimate the resource requirements for most if not all of the solutions they sell. Unfortunately, this is probably not the case, no such database of performance data exists and there is virtually zero historical information available about the ECM Solutions Open Text sells. Indeed, virtually all performance and scaling information available is based upon an out-dated "Document Centric Usage Profile" that does not map well to many of the diverse solutions Open Text sells. Open Text acknowledges in it's literature that such a Usage Profile shouldn't be used, rather a customer-driven Usage Profile should be created but this often feels like the cart-before-the-horse to customers, how are they supposed to know what the Usage Profile is?

To be fair to Open Text, the vast majority of the customer performance data they do have comes from problematic systems, why else would they be contacting Open Text? No it takes a concerted effort of pro-active data gathering to solve this problem, a program that would have to involve many dozens of people within many different departments within Open Text and a not insignificant amount of computing resources (trust us, we know :-)) and could have little expectation of generating revenue, in fact if it was done correctly it could well lead to lost revenue for their Global Services department. And, while it seems likely that this would help the Sales department, they do not have the requisite contact with customers post-purchase to have been able to gather the data.

So, there has been little historic incentive to build out such tools and, apparently, any customer outcry has not been loud enough to convince Open Text to provide them and so Livelink-Experts.com filled the gap.

Whether it is our Usage Profile Generator, our ECM Costing Calculator, the original Online Livelink Thread Calculator, or the future tools being built out by Livleink-Experts.com, our commitment is the same. The tools can be used for free by all community members and community membership is free. We hope you find these useful and that you share your data and this community with others.