IBM Knowledge Center Coming Soon for IBM i Documentation

For some of us who have been around for a long time, we distinctly remember the days when systems were delivered with tall stacks of books – reference material for the system and software we delivered. But that was a long time ago. For many years now, that kind of information has been delivered over the Internet, in the Information Center. What you might not have known, though, was that there were actually many Information Centers – more than 800 of them! Though they looked similar, their internals were different, and sometimes those differences showed through. Because of its age, the technology on which the Information Centers are based had some limitations. So it’s time for something better.

IBM will soon be providing a new “one-stop shop” for all your IBM product information needs, including IBM i. This new “Knowledge Center” contains all of the individual IBM Information Center documentation under one system. It’s designed this way to make it much easier to search and find content from any interest area, and to give you the ability to customize your own knowledge space.

All of the Information Center documentation for IBM i releases 6.1 and 7.1 have been migrated to this new framework, and when 7.2 comes out later this year, all of its information will be accessed using Knowledge Center. Eventually the saved and bookmarked links to your favorite pages and content will be redirected to its new home in Knowledge Center.

Great care went into the design of this new Knowledge Center. The designers spent a great deal of time really listening to our users to find out what they struggle with daily when trying to research documentation. This new framework addresses a lot of those struggles, giving you the ability to truly customize and save what is most important to you while also giving you greater capability in finding what is important to you.

It also has a helpful new capability to create your own "Collections". People tend to seek out the same information repeatedly over time. Knowledge Center collections give you the capability to categorize useful content by whatever organization works best for you.

The Knowledge Center is currently in beta, so if you would like to participate, simply use URL:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/

And to view IBM i information, navigate to Software>System Software>IBM i:

Things to note:

• This beta will run until the end of February 2014
• IBM wants Feedback! After you have navigated and used Knowledge Center, sign in with your IBM ID and take a few moments to complete the survey on IBM Knowledge Center:

https://www-304.ibm.com/software/support/trial/cst/forms/survey.wss?id=5323

For more information on Knowledge center, visit:

            https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/techcontent/?lang=en_us

Oh, and for the record, we have already asked that the “KC” people remove the “(AS/400, iSeries and System i)” note from the navigation pane, and we’ve been told those changes will be made – probably even before the Beta ends. There are also some pre-GA links with older names, and those will be changed before everything goes live, too.

I want to thank Kristi Harney in our IBM i development organization for coordinating our use of “KC” and for providing me the information necessary to write this blog entry.

I’ll be sure to tweet when the new Knowledge Center goes live. Expect it some time ahead of the 7.2 announcement.

 

 

 

Comments

[DrFranken]

My first reaction is: EXCELLENT! Hardware is on top!! :-) :-)

[Doug Bridwell]

This looks extremely useful!
I need to use it for a while but initially it looks great.

[J Torok]

This looks GREAT!!! At last, one link to rule them all. Get it?

Roll on go-live (and IBM i 7.2).

Thank you.

[Steve Will]

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Keep them coming. I have forwarded them (well, a link to this blog, with the comments attached) to the Knowledge Center team.

"One link to rule them all ..." I love it!

[Barry Colson]

This is sooo much better! Good job! You need to get this out quickly.

[Ronald Schmitz]

What about Support Portal? How does this relate? Is KC a subset, a superset, a replacement?

[Steve Will]

Ronald, the Support Portal remains separate from the product documentation, as it has been. There is a link between the two -- I know our IBM i welcome page on the Knowledge Center has a direct link to the Support Portal.

[Aaron Bartell]

Glad to see them looking into this. Man, it is FAST - that helps a lot.

I went to give feedback but gave up after I realized the daunting number of required fields so I will comment here to see if anybody concurs.

In short, the knowledge base feels a bit like the year 2008. Why? Because it doesn't incorporate very many of the features we see in the most popular tools in 2013/2014. In particular I would expect many of the features that StackOverflow.com/discourse.org have so community participation can be voted up/down, editable comments, answers AND comments, notification mechanisms, ability to see where somebody else made a comment (i.e. trending), etc.

The other feature I'd love to see is the ability for the community to submit corrections/additions in organized fashion. GitHub does this with "fork" and "pull requests"** and it has fundamentally changed collaboration and contribution as is evidenced by GitHub taking over as the top open source site a few years back.

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CpllxXPsvw

I realize the Knowledge Center might not be the place for this type of thing, but where?

Aaron Bartell