In general, system administration functions that aren’t a core part of Eclipse (such as printer management, backup monitoring, etc.) are being gradually phased out of Eclipse. This is in line with best practices in the software industry. By utilizing the proper 3rd party software for managing functions outside of Eclipse, Eclipse is able to reduce the amount of development hours spent maintaining duplicate functionality, and we can focus our development efforts on the wholesale distribution software.
We understand that our customers’ goal is to reduce downtime and increase the availability of the Eclipse software and its companion products, so our goal is to provide our customers’ system administrators with the best possible tools for each task. Often times, these are not Eclipse’ but rather vendor tools (Red Hat, CUPS, CrashPlan, VSIFAX, etc.). This is the drive behind our recent efforts to provide our customers with additional documentation and training, available through our Knowledge Base and Education department. We want our customers’ system administrators to be familiar with using the same administration tools that our Systems support team uses on a day to day basis.