Bye Bye Wikis - Hello Knowledge Center and Welcome Back PDFs

Just in time for the release of Connections 5 (on June 26th people - mark your diaries),  the IBM documentation team are slow launching the new Knowledge Center  that is replacing many of the existing Wikis and all of them going forwards with IBM generated content. (clap)(clap)(dance)(clap)(finger click)(more dance)

The Knowledge Center currently links back to the Wikis for some products (such as Connections 4.5) and has generated content for others (such as Sametime yay!).  Eventually all the newer Wiki documentation (for example Connections 5) will disappear and reappear in the Knowledge Center.  I’m definitely in favour of the documentation being sourced authoritatively from IBM once more and not open to general editing for a start but there’s also the option to create your own collections of useful content and then print entire topics to PDF.

That needs repeating WE CAN NOW PRINT DOCUMENTATION TO PDF (and therefore printers) once more by selecting only a parent topic.  I think you need to login first, create a collection and save to PDF but it works beautifully for me.

The Knowledge Center contains documentation for ALL IBM products in one place with Sametime, Connections, Domino etc under ‘Collaboration Solutions”. You can bookmark the products you go to the most to make it more useful or create your own collections.  This is a big step forward from googling and finding Connections 2.5 content higher in the search results than 4.5 or finding stuff by remembering that the databases for the wikis are stwiki and lcwiki!

A huge thank you to the documentation team for recognising the wikis just weren’t working for us and for giving me back my offline pdf documentation.  As the products get ever more complex, so does the documentation and nothing beats printing and reading content for me.

Here’s a link to the Sametime 9 section but you can easily navigate up to other products from there

 

 

 

 

 

16 thoughts on “Bye Bye Wikis - Hello Knowledge Center and Welcome Back PDFs

  1. Yes a big step in the right direction, but there is really more work to do for the documentation team. I hope the will continue.

  2. On the downside, documentation errors will take longer to get updates since folks can no longer add comments and make changes that will alert others of issues with documentation. There are many issues with the Sametime 9 documentation on the wikis.

    • I actually disagree. We can still add comments but we shouldn’t be submitting changes to documentation for a product we had no role in developing. I’ve seen plenty of wiki updates and unless they came from IBM I took them with a grain of salt because the person writing isn’t writing how the product works, they don’t know if they didn’t develop it, they are writing to their own experience. That doesn’t belong in official documentation.

      If the content is wrong submit a comment to the documentation team to get it fixed and make it the responsibility of IBM to fix it.

      Gab

  3. This is interesting. Is this a general trend or retirement of the term “wiki”? Is “wiki” considered old-school now? Will the “wiki” application in the actual Connections product be renamed?

    • I’d say it’s simply an acknowledgment that authoritative product documentation can’t come from individuals with no validation or peer review. Wikis are not a suitable format for IBMs documentation being too easy to edit / delete and update incorrectly. Wikis themselves as a collaborative working approach are still valuable , just not for this.

  4. Thank you IBM for bringing back 2009 and writing your own documentation instead of asking us to do it for free.

    Maybe exams are next.

  5. Woohoo! I adored the YellowBooks (still hang on to some Domino 4.5 to R5 ones) and the Knowledge centers are the next best thing. I also would like to point out theat the pages have a ‘Comments’ section. I will be using those if I see anything off.

  6. I would like for IBM to drop the disclaimer on the comments. It takes up valuable screenspace, and really: “By adding a comment, you accept our IBM Knowledge Center Terms of Use. Your comments entered on this IBM Knowledge Center site do not represent the views or opinions of IBM. IBM, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to remove any comments from this site. IBM is not responsible for, and does not validate or confirm, the correctness or accuracy of any comments you post. IBM does not endorse any of your comments. All IBM comments are provided “AS IS” and are not warranted by IBM in any way.”. Hello IBM, we are grown-ups, get real. What level of audience is this addressing? It’s insulting.

    • Hi Lars,

      I’m Jamie Roberts, the Product Manager / UX Lead for IBM Knowledge Center. I have already taken your comments up with our Legal department. Needless to say, it’s a very tricky thing to mix authoritative and warranted information with public comments, especially for a site with millions of users world-wide.

      We’re also working on improving screen space in the next version of IBM Knowledge Center. But as we step into social-without giving up authorized content-there’s bound to be some tension between the content owners and commentary on that content.

      Thanks for your comments, and your patience!

  7. intermediate solution until my comments to ‘ibmkc@us.ibm.com’ are processed: I added the line ‘ibm.com##DIV[class=”commentDisclaimer”]’ to my AdBlock filters and the disclaimer is gone…

  8. Woo hoo! ‘Nuff said!

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