Comments on: Long Live the infocenter !

By: Andy Stanford-Clark

Andy Stanford-Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:30:21 +0000

@tricia thanks for your comments. By “first foray”, I very much meant “for me”!
This project has shown me that there’s more to the pre-canned view that we usually see of the good ol’ infocenter, and I agree that the opportunity is there for the taking. I just hope people will take it before we start to look as archaic as paper manuals.
Would love to see your demo – will be in touch!

By: Tricia York Garrett

Tricia York Garrett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:43:38 +0000

As an information architect in WAS, I agree that pondering the need to modularize our information is a great use of a Think Friday, but have to disagree with “first foray.” There is a TON of great IBM User Technologies and brand development team work going on in this space. The IBM ID community has official, achievable guidelines for modularizing our navigation for reuse. We have the technical framework to let aggregators discover and do something useful with the bit parts. Now there are no excuses; ID teams and others producing info (that’s you, wiki author!) need to JUST DO IT … this is where scheduling the work into product releases becomes vital. Thank you for emphasizing the importance of this behind-the-scens architecture.

I really can sympathize with our customers and customer-facing personnel, the would-be “modular content reusers,” because this is the stage of “partly there, sometimes there, but not quite there” (my own product docs included). I’ve included the web site for a tool I’d love to demo for anyone trying to put together their own subsetted info center today; it could make it easier than you describe. But, you’re quite right, if you’re saying it’s too difficult if one has to hack the info center to obtain content in modular enough form. At minimum, all docs plug-ins could be downloadable.

P.S., I also appreciate your “Long live the infocenter” tagline and the fact that it does not seem ironic. There are so many haters out there!

By: Martin Packer

Martin Packer — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:05:41 +0000

Puffy, I suspect yer hat flew off. 🙂

By: Andy Stanford-Clark

Andy Stanford-Clark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:24:42 +0000

What this really indicates, is that our approach to structuring large amounts of information into a usefully navigable information architecture is fundamentally flawed.
We need the ability to slice and dice large bodies of (undoubtedly) valuable information into subsets that mere mortals can digest in mind-sized chunks (as Seyour Papert would say), according to their particular interest based on perhaps their role or the task at hand.
Carving out the microbroker piece was a first foray into this area, which is (hopefully) useful for microbroker fans, but more interestingly has given me a load of additional ideas for further ThinkFriday hackery in this area!

By: kellyd

kellyd — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:16:32 +0000

*jumps up and down with excitement*, while wearing her KM hat. What a great use of a ThinkFriday!

By: nol

nol — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:02:26 +0000

In the interests of balance, here’s a link to the official IBM Lotus Expeditor Infocenter. You can compare for yourself the accessibility of the microbroker specifics.

To be fair on the original, the information is largely where you would expect it if you were approaching it from an Expeditor perspective. But I do agree that for the users with more of a microbroker background, the information can be hard to find.

This is the continual challenge of meeting the requirements placed on a product from subtly different audiences.

That all said, it is very cool to have a one-stop shop for our docs 🙂