ISI in the News

Please contact Charles Ruykhaver for more information about this press release.

ISI's Infortel-CMS Keeps You On Top of (Not Entangled in) Your Cabling Plant

SCHAUMBURG, IL - When you stop to consider how many outlets there are in your office jacks for electricity, phone lines, data ports and think about all the equipment that?s plugged into them, you start to realize why it might take a while for your IS manager to implement a move/add/change on your behalf. How do you know which jacks are operational and what they are connected to? What extension is that phone jack currently called? Is that jack connected to the new phone system or the old cabling for the previous switch? If you are, instead, the one who oversees cabling in your company, you?ve already wrestled with these questions, and to make your life easier, you should know about ISI Inc.'s (Schaumburg, IL 847-995-0002) Infortel-CMS Cable Management Software v.1.2.1.

As much as we rag on GUI software in this magazine as being bulky or not offering many options, this cable management package lets you diagram your cabling with a GUI interface or work with text descriptions. With no chagrin at all, I ran for the GUI because I'm not a trained cableologist. (Isn't that what they're called?)

But I have handled my share of software and was pleased with the design of Infortel-CMS. It's probably more intuitive to those better-versed in cabling, but it supports a range of users, from the fairly cabling-impaired to the IS person in charge of the plant. Infortel-CMS lets you describe (define) the types of terminations, cables, and equipment in your office and connect them all together into a network of circuits so that you will know at a glance which ports and jacks are available, what they're connected to, and what they do. It's easy to update (and it can be updated by multiple users, if you choose), so changes are more likely to be made than in some systems, where adding equipment or moving a station set isn't all about drag and drop. But we'll get to that in a minute. Infortel-CMS also helps you stay on top of capacity of your installed cabling, including wiring for voice, RS-232, Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI, ISDN, and electrical systems. Each circuit can be represented graphically by icons connected by lines. Clicking on any icon (say, a router icon) will bring up all related info, ranging from which ports are in use to the manufacturer and purchase price. Depending on how you use the information, you can track down faults in your wiring, calculate spare capacity in your network, or pull up an inventory of your equipment.

START ME UP
It all starts with defining a site or sites: depending on the software package that you purchase, it can support one or multiple sites and simultaneous users. You can configure CMS to allow concurrent onlookers, yet restrict change authority to one person. Or you can allow multiple users to make changes, just not all at the same time. A site in Infortel-CMS can be defined as anything from a building to a floor to a department to distinct networks (data or telecom or electrical, for example). When you describe your site, you can include address, contact numbers, even a bitmapped image of it.

Let me back up just a little bit. It all really starts with installation. As each software manufacturer endeavors to defeat fraud with security measures of increasing stringency, ISI has its own means of keeping track of CMS users. When you start to load the new software, you'll hit a screen that displays an ID number, which you then give to a particular employee of ISI. He gets back to you with a unique string of numbers (quite long) that he has generated for your system. Plug them in and vóilà; you can begin creating your cabling skeleton. The software loads painlessly into self-created directories on your hard drive. You'd better have at least 12MD disk space for the program and that's before you start loading data. The software runs on Win 95/98/NT; we worked on an HP Pentium-class PC with 2GB hard drive capacity.

After describing the site TELECONNECT, I imported a quick sketch of the building I created in Paint, so that everyone looking at the site onscreen would know the joint right away. This is a goofy use of a truly handy feature, as some company names for locations (83, in our case) don't tell you diddly. ("Oh, I didn't know 83 was in the middle of Manhattan?) Well, that could present interesting problems if you, say, planned to use a line-of-site wireless T-1 for your CO trunk.

WHO'S IT FOR?
Not only is this package handy for helping IS decide if he has the capacity on his network for installations of new people or new equipment, it also helps managers in budgeting because as you create your network of cabling and equipment, you are asked to define each termination, cable, etc. The information fields associated with equipment can tell you, for example, not only what your call accounting server is plugged into, but the date and purchase price of the PC, the type of depreciation you expect it to follow (linear), the serial number, and the versions of OS and call accounting software running on it. And as with defining sites, you can include a picture of the equipment (PC) in the record, in case it wanders off to another department. Any manager asked to create a budget will find this program helpful in deciding which equipment to replace; any accountant working on due diligence can use reports of cost and depreciation from this program.

By now you've discovered that this isn't a typical TELECONNECT Testdrive. I could tell you explicitly about how you create cables, create terminations, and define equipment, but all I did was fill in blanks with information. I connected them together to create circuit records. (For big cabling jobs you could provide a name range for cables and let CMS create the records. CMS can also automatically create links as you define a circuit. Or you can set default cable types to speed up the process by dropping the templates into place in your network.) Use the icons from the library installed in the CMS software, or create (or import) your own icons to be displayed in schema. Icon bitmaps are limited, so please no vacation pictures (64x64 pixels). Click. Enter data. Click. Drag. Copy. Paste. It's very straightforward, and I wasn't stumped by any hitches. In fact, when I did get confused, I found the manual to be one of the best written I've seen in a very long time. When you've entered your data, you can look at schematics of your network, drill down to the specifics of each component, print predefined reports using the data you've entered, or even export the data to other programs that are ODBC-compliant, so you can produce reports in other formats.

It's a thorough piece of software, one that walks the fine line between offering a simple-to-use GUI and offering loads more options to define components than you might expect. You can diagram using predefined templates for many of the pieces of a network (predefined cables or jacks, for example), or you can build the entire network from scratch if you've created something weird and wonderful in your own company. For those of you who are hardcore cabling types, you should know that the Infortel-CMS is 100% compliant with the requirements of the TIA/EIA-606 Administration Standard for the Telecommunications Infrastructure of Commercial Buildings.

Printed in the March 2000 issue of Teleconnect Magazine and awarded TELECONNECT Editors Choice 2000