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IBM Knowledge Center: A one stop technical content shop!

Technical Blog Post


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IBM Knowledge Center: A one stop technical content shop!

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High quality content = High value content!

In past years, IBM product documentation was part of an information center concept with more than 850 individual URLs and over 2200 IBM products that made up more than 60 million individual pages.

That concept has changed.

The IBM Knowledge Center initiative contains all the existing product individual URLs in one place providing a consistent,
simplified and improved user experience for search and navigation, as well as improved performance and reliability.

If you used information centers, you know one of the frustrating things was bookmarking a topic so you can find it easily again at another time. IBM Knowledge Center makes that task a lot easier. Now you can bookmark a topic, a product page or version, for example, IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center V5.2, a search query, and even product search filters--all without logging in to IBM Knowledge Center.

IBM Knowledge Center lets you define your own collections, your own groups of information, about any IBM product that you use in your environment. You can even create a collection with subsets of information within your product set (for example, how to install IBM Tivoli Storage Manager or troubleshoot with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center messages). You can add to your collections as you discover new information that you want to access frequently, and you can even rearrange the topics in an order that makes the most sense for you.

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You can also easily create a PDF of your information collection (your own book, per say) and save or print it whenever you want.

Because a collection is actually a set of pointers to topics, if the information in any topics is updated, the collection will automatically include the updates. You won’t need to redefine your collection to keep your information current; it will always be up to date.

Because IBM Knowledge Center carries its search filter and location information in its URLs, you can easily share direct links to search queries or pages. Just copy and paste the URL and email it, tweet it, or blog about it. Newer browsers make this design even more attractive, because they allow the synchronization of bookmarks across multiple devices! Once you have your IBM Knowledge Center topics or searches bookmarked, you can get to them from your workstation, your tablet or your laptop. The millions of pages on information centers should all redirect to the right place in IBM Knowledge Center when the conversion happens in March.

To prepare for the upcoming redirection:

  • Update your links to your current product information center topics
  • Try out IBM Knowledge Center here and update your information center bookmarks to point to the equivalent topics in IBM Knowledge Center.
  • Encourage your customers and business partners to update their links and bookmarks and get used to the navigation in IBM Knowledge Center

IBM Knowledge Center is in public beta right now. Again, try it here: IBM Knowledge Center

For more specific information, check out the Help topics for IBM Knowledge Center.

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ibm16166209