Hello IBM? Your Sametime Requirements are borked

The first thing I do when building any product is go check the latest system requirements in case they have changed.  That’s a bit of a challenge with Sametime since the system requirements are (and have been for some time) nonsense.  No reference to WebSphere 8.5.5 and definitely no reference to the fixpacks or even the individual servers.

Try it yourself.  Go here http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27007792 and click on any of the requirements for 9.0.1 Complete, Communicate or Conference to see what I mean.

Buried in the actual help documentation is the phrase “Restriction: Most of the Sametime 9.0.1 servers that run IBM WebSphere® Application Server require version 8.5.5.8” but that doesn’t help anyone wanting detailed system requirements or who doesn’t find that page.

If anyone from the ST or documentation team sees this - please fix it.

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