First week report!

Here it is, the first week is (almost) over. This week I was working on setting up an OBR (next week will be for that too). SIP Communicator recently got an interesting proposal by Luminis. They are ready to provide SC with a provisionning server. It will work as follows:

1. The developper will match the bundles with groups and groups with licenses via a special client that communicates with the provisioning server.
2. The user of SC will open an update UI, and will be proposed licenses (users don't want to see 25 bundles for the same feature. They want the whole feature in one package, which we call a license)
3. When downloading the licenses, the server will send deployment packages to the client associated with the licenses chosen.
4. The client application will install the deployment packages via a deployment admin.

Some things still have to be cleared up though. How will the client application communicate to retrieve the licenses? How will the server return the deployment packages (No OBR for deployment packages)?

What are the pros and cons of both approaches?

Provisioning server

Pros

• Users of SC can install features instead of bundles
• Easy to match bundles with groups/licenses
• Usage of deployment admin to install deployment pacakages
• Provided by Luminis :)

Cons

• No standards for communicating with the provisioning server. (Nothing like an OBR for deployment packages.
• The developper would have to create a service to talk to his repository)
• DeploymentAdmin isn't in the current release of Felix yet. From what I've seen, it will be in the next one.

OBR

Pros

• Easy for the developper
• Implementation already available in Felix

Cons

• Bundles aren't always significative for the user.
• A feature approach is much more interesting

Everything will be clarified during next week! We will most probably use Luminis server, but we could also use both solutions. To be continued... :)