[Note - coauthored by Marie Scott and Thomas "Duffbert" Duff]
If you’ve worked with Domino for any length of time, you’ve run into the request to either move data into or out of Notes. It may be getting data from a Human Resource system to populate a phone directory database in Notes. It may be getting catalog orders from a Notes database to feed into an order fulfillment system fed by an Oracle database. And there’s always the need to keep directories synched up in various platforms (Domino directory, LDAP, Active Directory, and so on). What are your options?
You can always enable Domino Enterprise Connection Services, or DECS, to do some of that. There’s Lotus Enterprise Integrator, or LEI, but that’ll cost you extra. Axceler has their Notrix package, which does a very good job of pushing data back and forth between Domino and other systems, but again, it’s a third-party tool that costs money. And of course, talk to any developer and they’ll swear they can code their own solution that won’t cost a cent because they’re already working there. And we all know how those types of systems work out in the long run… they don’t.
There’s an option you likely haven’t considered, however. It’s probably the best free Domino tool you’ve never heard of. And even better, it’s from IBM so you’re staying within the IBM product family. Its name is officially the IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator or TDI for short. This easy-to-install standalone software product allows you to build import/export/transformation workflows between various data sources, as well as schedule them to run at particular times or on certain events. And while the name may have “directory” in it, don’t be misled. This software is meant to move any data from one source to another. [Duffbert – I think they just put “directory” in there so as to not scare away administrators…] [Marie -- I think administrators know the difference and can develop despite what developers think]
Over the next few weeks (or however long it takes us), we’re going to post a series of blog entries on TDI, how to set it up, how to program it, and practical examples on how it can be used. By the time we’re done, we hope that you’ll have a valuable new software tool at your disposal, one that will make you the data manipulation guru where you work.
Where Do You Find It?
If you go out to your Passport Advantage account, you can download the software from there. Do a search for “Tivoli directory integrator”, and you’ll find the following:
The nice thing about TDI is that you don’t have to download a number of additional files and packages to get this set up. If you expand out the eAssembly file listed above, you’ll find the particular TDI download for whatever operating system you’re running.
Oh, did we mention that TDI runs on all the different operating systems just like Domino?
