CA Gen wiki thoughts

[Geoff Stratton]

I have commented on the CA Gen 8.5 wiki a few times now and thought I would share my early experiences.

 

Interaction #1
This did not go well in that nothing happened.  I will put that down to user error.

 

Interaction #2
This related to clarification on the notes associated with subsetting tasks for the HE. 

 

I received a response within a day or two saying the issue was being investigated.  Off to a good start.  The next day I was advised of changes by email via the watched page feature.  Another plus. 

 

However the changes did not appear complete.  This was reinforced when I received another update the following day.  I am still not sure if the change is complete.

 

I realise wikis are meant to be living documents but only certain users can update this particular wiki.  Wikis are also meant to be an authoritative source of information.  As such I do not expect to see partial updates as they happen but to see the final published update once it has been reviewed.  Until then the page could be just marked as under review to indicate a possible upcoming change.  Potentially one of the reviewers would be the person who made the original comment to confirm if the changes address their concern.

 

Interaction #3
This was another attempt at Interaction #1

No response as yet.  It has only been one cay so no drama.

 

Interaction #4
This related to clarification on the JRE version for Gen tools

Commented today so obviously no response yet.

 

Wiki generally
I am a fan of indexed PDFs published regularly and reasonably frequently.  I prefer the A4 page to a sometimes longer web page.

 

I am pleased to see that I can view the page history and compare various versions to see the changes made.  I would like the wiki to be able to identify changed pages over a nominated time but cannot see how.

 

My current process for this is to download the PDF manuals monthly and compare them to the previous month.  I plan to export the entire wiki as a PDF, to index it and compare to the previous.  I am not sure this will be as successful with the wiki because of its sheer size for one; 6,000 pages as a single PDF. 

 

The other reason for the export is to retain an offline copy for those occasions when I am not internet connected.

[Brian Everett]

Hi Geoff-

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback. All of your feedback is helpful.

• Regarding timely responses, we will refine our response time for all comments, with at least an acknowledgement (as you received) and a detailed reply when we close out a request.
• Regarding your PDF comments, you can quickly create PDFs from the wiki. From anywhere in the space, click the PDF icon in the upper-right corner. You will then get a PDF of that parent page plus all of its children. The output is quite similar to the pre-wiki PDF format. However, the content is optimized for the wiki format. We built in this print functionality at the request of many mainframe clients, who need offline access and/or need copies for disaster recovery. I confirmed that printing this space works. As you note, given the volume, it may take some time. Some folks print by each section (Administrating, Installing, and so on).
• Regarding changes over time, the watch feature, which you are using, is the best option to see changes as we make them. Each page also offers a View History option under Tools (when you are logged in). Our infrastructure team also has a work item on their backlog to create a global change report (for example) as we have received this feedback from several clients. 

 

I hope this info helps. Please stay tuned for a closeout reply for your requests that originated this thread.

 

Again, we appreciate your feedback. We will continue to iteratively improve this space.

 

Regards,
Brian Everett
Application Development Information Architect

[Geoff Stratton]

Hi Brian

Since the original post I have taken the opportunity to provide comments on other documentation issues I have observed.

• Timely responses - Someone usually responded within one maybe two days, a timeframe with which I was happy;
• PDF - The CA Gen wiki took 30 minutes to create and the CA APM wiki 15 minutes.  I consider this to be quite a long time.  Perhaps CA could automatically export a copy on a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) basis to improve the experience for those users wanting a PDF;
• Changes - Yes, I managed to find the page history feature and also that the search facility allows a time dependent search.  My only concern there relates to one of my previous comments, namely that incomplete changes are applied to pages so you may see multiple history entries when there really was only one logical change.  The same applies to cosmetic, eg formatting, changes which in most cases are not important.  I look forward to a global change report;

Based on all the above I strongly recommend that anyone who finds an issue with the documentation, no matter how small, provide a comment to have the issue addressed.  Participation such as this can only improve the documentation for everyone and it will happen quite promptly depending on the complexity.

[Brian Everett]

Thank you again Geoff for your thoughts and partnership. We have backlog item for a global change report. I will look into the PDF suggestions.

 

Please keep the comments coming!