"The ability to control and manage your organisation's users, data access permissions, printers, Baan companies, software environments, databases and patch/solution installation is core to the secure and robust operation of Baan. As business requirements change and new devices / personnel / test platforms need to be catered for, so you need to ensure that the infrastructure is in place to be able to support and monitor the set-up. Brookdale is vastly experienced in all Baan administrative issues and can help you to either create new, or optimise existing configurations. "
An organisation's personnel, infrastructure and technical requirements are often subject to constant change and
have to be altered or monitored in order to ensure effective system operation. This might be in respect to user and
role management, device control, batch job management, auditing requirements, database management or the
understanding and maintenance of the Baan directory structure.
Brookdale can advise and assist your technical staff in all matters relating to the administration of your Baan system.
System Infrastructure -
Software Components -
Solution Installation -
Users & Roles -
Baan Software Environment
How?
Baan administration actually covers a wide range of tasks and, depending on how much your organisation decides to
customise or develop Baan, can include building a development environment (see the
Development page) and creating new software components. It is essential that your technical staff appreciates and is
able to manage your set-up.
It is because system administration needs to be an 'in-house' activity that Brookdale's assistance can often come in
the form of technical training in specific areas. Training courses can be tailored to suit your particular requirements
(see the Training page for more details), or less formal sessions can be arranged to help
with real-problem scenarios.
Alternatively, if you have specific administrative tasks that need addressing, such as the creation of a
customisation or development environment, then Brookdale can deliver this for you.
See below for some examples of the type of services offered, as well as some of the Baan issues
that are covered under the administration 'banner':
System Infrastructure
Your system infrastructure controls everything concerned with the inter-relationship of Baan, the operating system
on which it is running, your end users, hardware, any external programs you have and your database. This relationship is
illustrated in the example below for a Baan V installtion:
Brookdale can help to clarify the function of the various components and explain how they interact so that Baan's
operation can be fully appreciated by technical staff maintaining the system.
Software Components
One administrative task that your technical staff will have to perform might be the installation or removal of objects.
This is sometimes required in order to validate objects before a solution is released from Baan or, on older Baan or
Triton systems, where Product Maintenance and Control is not used.
It is important to recognise of which components a session can be comprised and how they are related:
Brookdale can clarify the naming, location and function of all objects to help ensure error-free maintenance,
or can undertake technical maintenance of your software components and objects.
Understanding where objects are held in the software environment and being able to back up old objects is crucial to
system maintenance.
Solutions
When installing Baan solutions or individual objects, particularly when customisation VRCs exist, it is imperative to
fully appreciate the impact this might have on existing functionality.
Care needs to be taken to ensure that customised components do not make the new components inactive by virtue of the
fact that they are in a lower-level VRC, or that the customisations are re-integrated into the new component.
Product Maintenance and Control can control installations to ensure that pre-requisites are in place (see below), but where
solutions have different base VRCs, as is the case when comparing standard and customised solutions, new standard
components can remain inactive.
Brookdale can offer assistance, advice or training with solution installation either via internal import/export of
dumps or by the use of Product Maintenance and Control. See the Development page
for further details about installing solutions via PMC.
If new developments or customised solutions are in place, Brookdale can help by creating sessions to identify
components that are likely to clash with new standard components, making the administration of solutions easier to manage.
Users & Roles
Most of the users in your organisation will be 'normal' type users in Baan. This means that authorisation must be given
to allow or prohibit access to specific sessions, database tables, companies or sensitive data. In Baan V, 'roles' can
be used for this purpose. In earlier releases, user authorisations are used to control access.
With roles, authorisations can conveniently be set up by department or job function and assigned to each user. If it
becomes necessary to change authority later on, simply the role has to be changed, not all the users.
Brookdale can help you configure your authorisations to control all types of access and hence ensure security in Baan.
Baan Software Environment (${BSE})
The BSE is the central directory structure that controls everything in Baan - from your table definitions and data
dictionaries to your users and audit files.
The 'application' directory shown above, for example, holds the definitions of all your sessions, forms,
menus, reports etc., whilst the 'lib' directory shown below contains information about users, roles, date and
currencies etc.
Some directories, such as 'temp', that stores the many temporary files generated in the day-to-day use of Baan,
need maintaining and purging regularly - a task of a system administrator.
Whether on Windows NT, Unix, AS400 or any other operating system, the ${BSE} is present and must be maintained. A
knowledge of where files and directories are stored and how they affect the operation of your Baan system greatly
aids any troubleshooting and enables your technical staff to make sure that Baan runs smoothly. Brookdale can
discuss and explain any issues that you have with the operation and maintenance of your directories and files.
Administrative Services