Does it get any better than this? Last week the IBM Support Portal was named one of the Top Ten Support Sites of 2010 by the Association of Support Professionals. And we deployed the latest release of the IBM Support Portal with user-requested enhancements and other improvements. Both were cause for celebration.

     Here's a quick rundown on the key changes in the portal's new release.

Improved language support
     One important change improves the translation quality of portlet content and technotes. The new release uses n.Fluent, an IBM statistical machine translation engine to translate this dynamic content. Statistical machine translation provides more accurate translation than the rules-based approach we were previously using. Our comparisons indicated n.Fluent provided significant increases in translation accuracy, so try it out and let us know what you think. (Use the Translate this page portlet in the right column.)

     The portal is now also sensitive to your ibm.com country/language setting in the ibm.com masthead and will automatically pick the appropriate language for 22 country/language pairs  for the labels, menus, and and other static elements of the page. Say for instance, you have Italy/Italian selected in the masthead. The Support Portal will automatically translate the portlet titles, task options, and other labels to Italian. If the masthead is not set, the portal will reflect your Web ID profile language preference or your browser language preference.

Additional products included
     Point of sale products are now covered by the IBM Support Portal. You can find these products under the Hardware branch of the product tree or by searching for them when you are selecting products.

Enhancements for managing your product list
     We also made some enhancements to the way you manage your product list.

• We added ibmi, AIX, and 4690 to the Operating Systems branch during product selection so they are more easily found.
• When you are selecting product version numbers, the latest versions are now listed first, so you don't have to scroll past older versions to find the one you need.
• When you search for a product in when managing your product list, you can now sort the results by keyword or alphabetically. This can make finding the product you want more efficient. 

    
Consolidating information to simplify the page
     We simplified the Downloads page by combining several portlets that provided access to downloads and fixes for different products. Now there is a single Downloads and fixes portlet so you'll always know where to look no matter which products you are working with.  We also consolidated all the information about the Support Portal into the Site availability and news portlet on the right.


Seeing empty portlets
     In the portal, portlets only appear when they have something to show you. So if the products in your product list don't have any content for, say the Configuration Planning portlet, that portlet will not appear even though it is "on" the page. Generally this works well, but if you try to add a portlet that is empty, it disappears after you added it, which can be confusing. Did the portlet get added or not? Where is it? Now there is a way to check and see which portlets are hidden because they lack content. Simply click the Show empty portlet link to make them appear. Click Hide empty portlets to hide them again. Remember, you have to be signed in to add, delete, and rearrange portlets on the pages.

     So.... does it get any better than this?  Well, actually, yes it will. With every new release of the portal, you'll see additional features and improvements. Keep your comments coming so we know what enhancements you want.

Tags:  electronic_support esupport support support_portal