Managing New Skies Settings

Configuration settings management in New Skies can plague airlines of all sizes.

To be successful at change management in New Skies, carriers resort to a gatekeeper concept where a single person or group is responsible for changes in the development / test / production environments.

The tools that ship with New Skies out of the box fall short of managing settings across multiple environments.  This is either a manual process of having two management windows open at the same time and tediously ensuring the settings are the same in both environments or a request is put in to an understaffed Navitaire operations group to run a database script to bulk copy settings between environments.  I’ve developed a tool that makes settings management between environments simple.

The Settings Manager tool has two modes, Compare and Sync.  Compare allows the comparison of two settings snapshots.  These could be brand new snapshots between two environments or even two different historical snapshots of the same environment.

If you’re a publicly held company in the US then you’re all too familiar with Sarbanes Oxley requirements.  New Skies is an IT system that directly affects financials, therefore, you’ll need the ability to audit changes to those settings.  The NewSkies database schema fails to provide an auditing of system settings; only saving information on the time a setting was last changed and the user who changed it.  Once a few changes to the same setting has been made, the original information is overwritten.

The Settings Manager can be scheduled to take snapshots of settings on a periodical basis and archive them for auditing.  Snapshots are then archived on disk – there’s no database to worry about or maintain.

Click play below for a demonstration of the Settings Manager.