We’ve decided to try out IBM’s Workplace Services Express at Agileware as it looks like promising technology. We will be documenting our experiences about installing and running a Workplace Services Express server from scratch (real go to whoa style), in series of blog entries on the Agileview.

In part 1 of this series, discussed buying and building our custom server and installing Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0.

Installing Workplace Services Express on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0
In this entry, we discuss installing Workplace Services Express v2.0 on our new Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.0 (dev.agileware.net) and our initial experiences using Workplace Services Express.

Where Do You Get Workplace Services Express?
Before we start, let me just quickly point out that if you’re an existing IBM Passport Advantage customer then you are entitled to, at no charge, a 20 user pack of Workplace Services Express. This is a limited offer which expires on September 15, 2005. So if you have not registered already, then probably a good idea to do so, now. More details available here @ Walnut.

Installing Workplace Services Express on dev.agileware.net
The moment of truth! Installing Workplace Services Express on dev.agileware.net.

  1. Log into dev.agileware.net.
  2. Launch a XWindows session.
  3. Insert the Workplace Services Express DVD (thanks to Kathy Staples @ IBM for providing that).
  4. Copy the install files to /opt/wse, about 2.65 GB of data in total. This takes about 10 minutes.
  5. Unpack the compressed install files. tar zxvf [insert filename].taz. This takes about 20 minutes.
  6. Run the ./install.sh file.
  7. A installation Wizard window then appears and prompts for license agreement, administrator login/password, server name, installation directory and click finish to continue and install Workplace Services Express.
  8. Installation process commences. This takes about 25 minutes.
  9. At the completion of the installation, the Wizard allows you to start the Workplace Services Express.

  10. Click next and Workplace Services Express starts up. After 2 minutes of waiting, I start to get worried. It seems to be taking a very long time to startup. Thinking that maybe Workplace Services Express is trying to use Port 80 & 25, I shutdown Apache and PostFix. No change. Sitting firmly on my hands (and not rebooting), I give Workplace Services Express the time it needs to start up - 5 minutes.
  11. Once the startup has completed, the Wizard displays a link to the portal.

  12. Click on the link and hey presto, there’s Workplace Services Express! Enter the Administrator login/password and we’re in.

  13. The Workplace Services Express interface starts to assemble itself on the page. Very nice.

Playing With Workplace Services Express
Now the fun really begins, play time…. But I won’t go into too much detail here, I’ll save that for another blog series. Anyway, here’s some initial comments.

Logging in as the administrator (wps admin) and navigating around Workplace Services Express, the interface is very professional, intuitive and most importantly consistent. So I do not expect new and infrequent users will have any trouble learning the product.

I thought that the default Port 9081 was an odd choice. Why not just use Port 80? But considering the audience for this product would be primarily Intranet based, I guess it does no harm. If this product were Internet based then there may be problems for some users behind any port blocking firewalls. Anyway, I assume it’s a simple matter to change the default Port in the system configuration.

I stopped & disabled all of the other running services and checked top. The total memory usage for the Linux server (running only core services) and Workplace Services Express was consistently 1.5GB to 1.9GB, as shown in the top screenshot. Much to my surprise the Linux swap was not even touched, so it’s all working from the allocated 2GB of memory. In general, CPU usage was not particularly high - so our AMD64 3200 is coping well with the load and there was no I/O wait meaning the hard disks were not thrashing either (with no swap being used this makes sense). So it looks like the recommended hardware specifications provided by IBM were correct, 2GB RAM minimum, 4GB RAM recommended for production. My gut feeling is that Workplace Services Express would take full use of 4GB RAM in a production environment.

For example: When creating a new Team Space in Workplace Services Express and monitoring load using top shows a load average ranging between 1 and 1.9, with 5 or more java threads executing with RSS (total memory allocation for the process) 730mb of memory.

When using Workplace Services Express for the first time, performance is OK. I know the topic of “performance” has been mentioned by a few other bloggers and I’ve also seen it first hand before when Kathy Staples presented Workplace Services Express @ Walnut. So I won’t harp on this fact too much. All the initial navigation and actions are slow, so I suspect there’s some on-demand compiling, execution and caching happening in the background. After there’s a few users accessing Workplace Services Express for a little while, performance definitely improves and Workplace Services Express delivers very acceptable response times for most page requests (<2 seconds). So the more you use it the faster it gets :)

We let Workplace Services Express run all day & night and played again the following day. We registered a few test users and did the things that users normally would do: created new pages, added Portlets and used the Document Manager and Team Space (and tried to break things). Overall performance had improved noticeably since the initial install. So maybe there’s a burn-in period required ;)

Occassionally the following error was displayed on a few pages (was not consistent) and refreshing the page usually solved the problem: 408 Connection timed out while reading request. Not sure what’s going on there.

Noticed that there was a RSS Portlet available too, so I tried to set that up with my favourite RSS feeds… but it seems to be hard-coded to some specific RSS providers, which I thought was kind of odd. Posted a question to the Workplace Services Express Dicussion Forum @ developWorks, and I’ve already received a few responses - fantastic!.

I experienced some random crashes and memory leaks when using either Internet Explorer 6 and Fire Fox 1 on a PC workstation which had been recently upgraded to Java 5. On other workstations using Java 1.4 there was no problem. So there may be some incompatibility between Workplace Services Express applets and Java 5 - beware of that little trap.

Starting & Stopping And Setting Workplace Services Express To Automatically Start On Linux
Now that Workplace Services Express has installed, I decide to see if any auto-startup scripts were installed and so reboot dev.agileware.net. dev.agileware.net reboots and it appears that Workplace Services Express does not start. Bugger.

A quick look at the /opt/ibm/WorkplaceServicesExpress directory reveals two very important files.
startWorkplaceServices.sh
stopWorkplaceServices.sh

Calling startWorkplaceServices.sh will startup Workplace Services Express. Whereas, stopWorkplaceServices.sh will shutdown Workplace Services Express. That’s fairly self evident :)

So to start Workplace Services Express automatically on startup:

  1. Michael created this workPlaceServices startup script
  2. Copied to /etc/init.d/
  3. Ran the command chkconfig --add workPlaceServices. Must run this command from within the /etc/init.d/ directory.

Now we can start Workplace Services Express by simply issuing the command, /etc/init.d/workPlaceServices start. And stop Workplace Services Express by simply issuing the command, /etc/init.d/workPlaceServices stop. Workplace Services Express will now automatically startup when ever dev.agileware.net boots up.

The system startup time seems to be a consistent 5 minutes before Workplace Services Express is initialised and ready for action. I expect with future versions this time will be reduced.

Closing Thoughts
Installation of Workplace Services Express is a no-brainer. No one should have any problems doing a default install and getting the product up and running. Configuration and integration with other systems (eg. Domino, LDAP, Exchange, MySQL etc) will of course, take longer and is highly dependent on those systems. I was really expecting to have to read the Release Notes, Installation Guide and possibly a Red Book, and then have to start editing the various configuration files, but this is clearly not the case. The default install is point-click-run. IBM definitely got things right here, well done guys!

Out of the box, Workplace Services Express is a very feature rich application. If you compare it to a default Lotus Notes/Domino install where you really only get Mail, C&S out of the box then Workplace Services Express is a much more user friendly and ready-to-use experience. Workplace Services Express has 112 ready-to-go Portlets, that is simply amazing.

It is very easy to configure a customer Portlet and display that on your Workplace. I even tried to configure the Mail & Calendar Portlet for our internal Domino Server but got stuck. However, the vibe of it is definitely there ;)

We certainly look forward to exploring in more depth the Portlets and capabilities of this product in the near future.

Might be time to go read the release notes now for Workplace Services Express, as suggested by the Workplace Channel Bloggers…. :)

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