How To Quickly and Easily Provide Access to Your Application Catalog Data While Maintaining Data Integrity

How To Quickly and Easily Provide Access to Your Application Catalog Data While Maintaining Data Integrity

Often times in the Enterprise environment, you may have a requirement to provide general
access to data and at the same time provide a measure of security on the same data to
ensure integrity. These conflicting requirements are often satisfied by creating a working
copy of the data for general use while maintaining tight access restrictions to the primary
data. This following tip will show you how.
In AdminStudio ConflictSolver v5.5, we support two ways in which you can create a copy of
your Application Catalog data:
1. Merging Application Catalog Information—Use the Merge Wizard to merge the source
Application Catalog's data into the currently open Application Catalog. The merged
data is not linked in any way to the source Application Catalog.
2. Linking to Application Catalog Information—Use the Remote Package Alert Wizard to
link to individual packages in remote Application Catalogs, and import these packages
into your local Application Catalog. To update the contents of your local Application
Catalog with the data on the remote Application Catalogs that you are linked to, you
can choose to Refresh package data.
Both wizards to allow you to effectively copy MSI package data between Application
Catalogs. However, these operations have some inherent limitations in that they require
user interaction and the mode of data duplication is to repeat the import process for the MSI
packages.
If you use SQL Server, then you have a third way to quickly and easily create working
copies of your Application Catalog:
Replicating Application Catalogs—Use Application Catalog Replication's Publication and
Subscription Wizards to distribute an Application Catalog database where it is needed across
a large enterprise or multi-national corporation. Data is replicated between a Publisher
Database Server and a Subscriber Database Server, which do not need to be available on
the same network.

AdminStudio v5.5 Enterprise edition includes a SQL Server replication tool available through
the main AdminStudio IDE – Catalog menu which makes the process of replicating large
amounts of ‘Application Catalog’ data very simple. You can provide wide ranging user access
to the replicated Application Catalog while maintaining tight access restrictions to your
primary Application Catalog.

Please refer to the AdminStudio v5.5 help topic, Sharing Application Catalog Data and
Application Catalog Replication, for more information on all of the options available for the
user who needs to create working copies of their Application Catalogs.