[LINK] [OT] Recommendations for a tool to map an enterprise infrastructure?

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

If you want modelling overkill try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Architect_(software)

You'll spend forever putting information in and the system will document 
it all. You (or the people putting the information in) won't actually 
understand much but you'll be able to print lots of pretty pictures.

I prefer to useVisio and construct the models so that I understand the 
environment and infrastructure. Visio is then just the vehicle for 
holding a representation of my models.

Powerpoint can be just as good but takes more effort.

To mangle the planning cliche - models are nothing - modelling is 
everything.

On 9/06/2010 9:58 AM, anthony.w.hornby at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> in our academic library our infrastructure is getting more and more complex.
> This is driven by the need to provide increasingly seamless experiences for
> clients across all of university services online (and the library services
> are a key component of that).
> However with a small administration team it is getting to the stage where
> we need to find better ways to visualise all the interactions that are
> happening to aid future planning and systems development, risk and impact
> assessment of changes etc.
>
> So I really want to map out visually the technologies we use, their
> purpose, data flows between them etc and am looking for recommendations for
> a tool that will allow us to generate a high-level representation that can
> be drilled down into for the detail and:
>
> 1) Doesn't cost the earth. Hosted cloud-based stuff is fine. Open source /
> commercial is fine.
> 2) Has a reasonable balance between features and complexity - just
> recommend anything you think might be useful and we'll have to work this
> one out.
> 3) Has intuitive and context driven tools - eg you can change things
> directly in the interface from where you are in the map
> 4) Has good help and preferably a reasonable user community.
> 5) Something that scales as our central IT area is looking for the same
> sort of tool to map the university major systems as well, and it would be
> good to use the same tool.
>
> All suggestions welcome !
>
> Regards Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>
>    


-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:	 brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com