1 About This Book

Congratulations. Your company has purchased the pre-eminent configuration, change, and release management software available on the market today. Application Configuration Console counters IT complexity and compliance with automation software that eliminates configuration management chaos in application infrastructure.

1.1 Scope

Application Configuration Console is a powerful, highly versatile tool in the hands of your IT infrastructure team. This book offers merely a glimpse; its purpose is to jump-start the process of harnessing that power. Thus, the scope is necessarily narrow and focuses on some of the basic tasks IT departments typically perform. The book also covers the first few things you need to do before you can perform these tasks.

1.2 Objectives

After you read this book, you should be comfortable enough with the application to perform basic tasks such as loading assets, tracking changes, comparing resources, and synchronizing your data.

1.3 Are You Ready to Get Started?

To answer in the affirmative, you have to have all your ducks in a row. This means that all of the following conditions have been met:

• You have installed and configured the Application Configuration Console software.

• Your Oracle database is accessible to the Application Configuration Console Server.

• LDAP (or some other) directory services are in place.

• Targeted resources have been identified.

• SSH (or FTP) support is in place to access hosts where resources reside.

If you need additional information on any of these requirements, see the Application Configuration Console Installation Guide.

1.4 One More Thing

This book introduces the fundamentals; the tasks that are presented here are fairly straightforward. At the conclusion of each simple task, however, a section summarizes additional or advanced topics that emanate from the basic concept. For detailed information on Application Configuration Console features and how to use them, consult the Application Configuration Console Online Help.