Managing clients and their plug-ins in an open environment
It sometimes makes sense to leave users completely in charge of their workstations, giving them complete latitude on installation and product and software versions. However, it can turn into an IT administration headache when direct management is required, for example, to make sure that a certain component has been brought to a required service-pack level to ensure compatibility with a company server.
This is particularly true for modular client software such the IBM® Sametime® client which, through its underlying Eclipse and Lotus® Expeditor platform, offers infinite customization possibilities through the addition of new plug-ins or extension of existing ones.
To mitigate this problem, this article describes and implements a lightweight and extensible framework to track and manage the configuration information of the Sametime client and plug-ins inside an organization.
