Motorola Manages Emergency Services Networks with TeleUSE

Motorola is one of the world's leading providers of wireless communications for worldwide markets. The Land Mobile Products Sector of Motorola Inc. designs, manufactures and distributes two-way radios and other forms of electronic communications systems for a wide range of customers, including agriculture, commercial, construction, education, state, local and federal government and health care markets, as well as for industrial, mining, petroleum and transportation companies and utilities.

Some of the large, complex radio systems the sector produces require network management systems to analyze use and needs and to troubleshoot problems. It is important the systems be fully functional because they often play a critical role during emergencies. Each radio system requires a network management system to analyze resource use and needs and to troubleshoot during an emergency--sometimes to report when parts of the radio system itself are out.

It's critical in these life-and-death situations that the network management system's front end be easy to use. That's why the 30-person team in Motorola's Land Mobile Products Sector rewriting the SmartZone radio system from a 4GL to the X environment assigned 10 people to the user interface alone. Steve Vranyes, senior software engineer, and the team's X Windows expert, investigated user interface management systems for the project.

"I had not undertaken such full-scale project development in X, and I wanted to increase the odds of doing it right," he reported from the Schaumburg, Ill. plant. He carefully examined TeleUSE from Thomson Software Products and one popular product in particular depth and took a more cursory look at some other alternatives before selecting TeleUSE. "They did the best job of any product that we investigated in their template feature," he said. They also offer a D language, called the Dialog Manager, that enables programmers to develop the interconnection between the interface and the application using a lot less code and also lets programmers new to X/Motif come up to speed faster.

"With TeleUSE, you only have to change the initial template. With other products you not only have to change the initial template, but the 60-100 places you have instantiated it. The development cycle is iterative, and making these changes wastes time and increases the chance of errors. TeleUSE's 'live links' take care of all the changes, whenever you make them. This becomes a long-term lifecycle benefit as we update and improve SmartZone. "

"Although some people shy away from using a language like the Dialog Manager TeleUSE offers as an option, we've been delighted with it. It helps new development come up quickly and it decreases the amount of code, which in turn, helps decrease the number of errors."

Vranyes has especially appreciated TeleUSE's Software BUS, a local event broadcast model (LEBM). The software bus allows them to have a module respond to an event that is appropriate for that module. Individual modules can also send an event. TeleUSE provides the mechanism to easily do this. This allows the network management application to keep in sync with the information in other windows. For the network manager, this means when information changes in one Window, it automatically changes in the other.

"The state of the object as it appears in one window will be consistent with the object as it appears - in a different view - in another window: for instance, information appearing as raw data and then appearing as a bar graph."

In addition to basic product development, Motorola is employing TeleUSE to internationalize the product for customers in Norway and the Middle East. "We have used TeleUSE extensively," said Vranyes. "I have a great deal of confidence in it. It has already gone a long way in paying for itself."