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Title: Manager's Guide to Distributed Environments: From Legacy to Living Systems by Richard Ptak, JP Morgenthal, Simon Forge, Richard L. Ptak ISBN: 0-471-19712-2 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 20 October, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Great for managers and mainframe types making the change
Comment: As someone who spent 24 years in "legacy" environments and who is now in the distributed world I found this book to be some of the most complete guides in print to making the transition.

What I really liked about this book is how the authors skillfully blended the descriptions of technologies in the distributed world with the methods and approach that characterize the "legacy" world. This is because distributed computing has a lot to offer from a technology point of view, but management of distributed systems lags behind the "legacy" world. My move was a lot like migrating from a predictable world of methods, processes and procedures to the wild west.

Some of the specific highlights were: very clear description of client/server systems and the underlying components. I personally gained a lot from the discussions on object technology, building distributed applications, and building extensible systems. The latter was especially useful to me because it exposed me to COM, Java and XML, and how these fit into the picture. Coming from a world where the standard buzzwords were CICS, JCL and the such I needed to fully understand the world in which I now work, and this book gave me an understanding of the technical underpinnings and their strengths and weaknesses.

Where this book blends the "legacy" and distributed worlds is in the chapters that deal with managing distributed systems. I gained two deep insights from this section: (1) managing distributed systems is a quantum leap in complexity from managing host-based systems, and (2) the processes and tools used to manage today's distributed systems have not reached the maturity of those that we used twenty years ago in the mainframe world. The authors did an excellent job of pointing out the challenges and realities of distributed systems management, and did a wonderful job of tying this to service level management using core business objectives as the bridge.

This book is truly a manager's guide that covers a lot of ground in technology and processes. It is too high-level for hand's-on technical folks who have worked in distributed environments, but is a wonderful source of information for people like myself who spent most of their career in mainframes and need to evolve into this wild environment called distributed computing. I enjoyed the book, gained a lot from it and recommend it to my former colleagues who are still in the "legacy" environment.

Rating: 2
Summary: Falls far short in security and management of networks.
Comment: While the book does a very good job of laying out options for building distributed environments, it falls far short in some critical areas. Neither directories, security, PKI, nor directory enabled networks (DEN) are adequately covered. As a matter of fact only security receives any coverage at all.

Security has 11 entries in the index, but none go beyond defining the role of security. There is no mention of how to implement security in a distributed environment.

Directories are not even listed in the index. Directories are crucial to the management and security of networks in a distributed environment. The directory enabled network (DEN) initiative is a standard interoperable approach that will be widely supported (if vendors are to be believed). DEN is absolutely necessary if distributed networks are to provide the reliability and security needed by enterprises.

Closely related to DEN is public key cryptography (PKI) which does not even show up in the index. Enterprises building extra-nets will need the security provided by the use of PKI.

These omissions cause me to give a low rating to an otherwise good book on distributed computing.

Rating: 4
Summary: A great source to help bridge IT and the Business Unit
Comment: Chapter 7 of this book is excellent at covering the issues that are key to bridging the gap between IT and the Business Unit.

IT needs to measure "success" in terms of business-meaningful terms - this book (and chapter 7 in particular) helps redefine IT success and focus IT on the issues critical to business alignment in the coming years.