This post is obsolete but left in place for historical purposes.
A few weeks ago, Steve Will wrote a couple blogs: IBM i Knowledge Center and IBM i 7.1 Knowledge Center, Redbooks, and developerWorks.
I’ve spent a little time exploring the Knowledge Center and this blog shares some highlights with you.
As Steve wrote, the Knowledge Center provides a single site for IBM documentation rather than the multiple information centers you may be using today. From an IBM i perspective, you can find the IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 information, as well as the Power information that was previously in the Hardware Information Center.
Since the Knowledge Center contains information from many products, you will most likely want to configure collections so you have a way to easily find (and search) the information that you are interested in.
In my example, I have set up a collection that includes IBM i 6.1, IBM i 7.1 and POWER7 hardware information. When you set up your own collections, you will need to sign in with your IBM ID. (Hint: the Sign In link is on the right-hand side of the upper black bar). At first I had some trouble with the IBM i information showing up as “Welcome” when I viewed my collection. The trick to getting it to show up as “IBM i 6.1” or “IBM i 7.1” is to navigate to the IBM i release you are interested in via the table of contents, right-click, and select “Save this product to an existing collection”, as the screen capture below shows.
When I go to My Collections, I see the one collection I have created named “My IBM Documentation”.
It’s great that you have one place to go to access IBM documentation, but the catch-22 is search. The Knowledge Center offers various ways to limit your searches and an article, Narrowing your searches in IBM Knowledge Center, discusses how you can do this. The IBM Technical Content blog has additional articles on the Knowledge Center capabilities that provide a useful overview of many features.
Bookmarks are another area where things have changed – they actually work! In the old information centers, when you navigated though the content, the URL would not change and bookmarks resulted in the main Information Center page, which is useless. You’d have to open the page in a new tab so it would have the complete URL and then you could bookmark the page. In the Knowledge Center, as you navigate through content, you’ll see the URL updated to reflect the page you are on and you can directly bookmark the page.
You can also share helpful content easily via the “Share” options. Perhaps I’ll be tweeting more as I’m reading things in the Knowledge Center since it will be so easy to do!
There are too many features to write about that are new or different from the prior Information Centers. Take some time to experiment with it. You might like it!
Finally, if you go to the IBM i 6.1 or 7.1 Information Centers, you will find a reminder to try out the Knowledge Center.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.