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r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

  • 1.  r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 24, 2015 09:41 AM

    I'm curious.

     

    Anybody else taken a look at the Endevor r18 documentation? Thoughts? Do you like everything being in one "document"? Is that useful? Can you find what you're looking for more easily? Less easily?



  • 2.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 25, 2015 02:41 AM

    Hi John,

     

    I am going to be controversial and say that, IMHO in its current implementation the wiki.ca.com for Endevor is a terrible evolutionary step.

    I really, really, really despise having to look for stuff currently.

     

    On the positive side, CA are supplying PDF documents on request for various sections but overall this tool needs work to make it usable.

    I do like being able to track changes or comment that are made, so it has potential but the ability to print small sections of manual as a PDF needs to be sorted 'tout de suite'

     

    Stuart



  • 3.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 25, 2015 12:04 PM

    Hi Stuart!

     

    Thanks for your thoughts.

     

    I haven't found the place where CA is providing the PDF document in various sections a la what has always been the case. What I did find, though, was a single PDF document that has all the sections now mashed together. Is that what you're referring to? The "new" consolidated all-in-one document?



  • 4.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 25, 2015 04:10 PM

    When I have asked CA for specific bits of the document (like the reports section) they have provided the requested subset of the whole.



  • 5.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 28, 2015 06:20 AM

    This morning, Saturday is a workday for me, I went to the WIKI site and was viewing the Release Guide and noticed that if i were logged in I could select the Print PDF link and save to my hard drive and it worked very well,

    Then i went down to the Web Services Doc and invoked the Print PDF link again and it gave me the same file name as i had for the Release Notes. I thought okay lets add a -1 to the file name. When I opened it, it was again the RELEASE NOTES not the Web Services documentation.

    What am i doing wrong?



  • 6.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Nov 29, 2015 08:29 PM

    Hi gunterr,

     

    You're not doing anything wrong. Everything is working as expected - when you pick the Print as PDF button, it downloads the entire doc set as one PDF, so the 2nd download just downloaded a second copy (It just happens that the release notes section is first).  Web Services in either guide should start on page 2435.

     

    There have been several requests to allow each 'manual' to be downloaded as a separate guide, but as some have pointed out, it makes searching across the guides easier.  It'll be good to get feedback on what would work best for you... do you want the all-in-one, or would it make more sense to select 'sections' to make a custom book by selecting the sections you require?  I like having access to everything offline so I'm sure this will work for me, but when I'm on-line, maybe the advantage of having a 'live-view' with all the reader comments is more valuable.

     

    Susan has asked in another thread, if all your developers have access to the internet, or is it limited.  If you need to specifically request "white-list" can you do it as *.ca.com or just for the doc at wiki.ca.com?



  • 7.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 01, 2015 12:36 PM

    Then you need a Page at the top that allows me to click on a link and go to the first page of the document.

    I cannot use it the way it is because i allow my users to have the Users and SCL Guide if the want it but i don't give them the Admin, Processor, API and Exits Guides for example.

    Bundling it together like this will prohibit me from delivering those two Guides to my client. Now i will have to spend personal hours to copy them out to separate documents because i don't have project hours allocated to fix what you are calling working as designed. I would like to suggest you rethink your design. I have an IDEATION request for an Auditors Guide which is under review, When it is delivered, you telling me that I now have to give an Auditor all of the documentation. I don't know about everyone else, but that information in some auditors hands is worse than not having anything at all. 



  • 8.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 01, 2015 05:07 PM

    I agree somewhat with Russ on this one.  In the past it has been difficult to find what you need in the manuals, and it was easier with the IBM Bookmanger indexing.  But without that and in order to eliminate confusion I have just given the end-users just manuals they need to support their role of Endevor.

     

    My 2 cents,

    Phon



  • 9.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 07, 2015 03:08 PM

    Yes, Documentation is much better for R18.  Agreed with Phon to have just given the en-users manuals they need and to eliminate confusion and more questions to Admin's roles.

     

    Jam



  • 10.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 08, 2015 11:48 AM

    It appears that others provides to users just what they need but with the manuals being packaged like they are now for R18 you either give this everything including the EXIT, API and Admin Guide or you give them nothing. If they get those guides, the really savvy ones are going to expect more they they are currently getting.



  • 11.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 08, 2015 01:52 PM

    Which raises an interesting question... who is that documentation for? Systems programmers? Users? Administrators? Installers? All of the above all at once?

     

    My own opinion is that by consolidating it into one "long" document, we've lost sight of being able to segment out information according to audience/topic. Yes, I can do it "myself" (sort of... it is PDF so that's not necessarily as easy as it sounds), but what was gained for the community by removing the breakdown by subject matter (User Guide, Administrator Guide, Processor Guide, Utilities Guide, etc)? To my mind, it's not helpful to do a find on (for example) "BSTCOPY" and get back reams of hits that are irrelevant to the topic I'm interested in. Yes, I can try to find the "manual" buried somewhere in that 2500+ page tome, but it sure was easier when I could just pull up "Utilities" and then search that "topic" for the utility information I was interested in.

     

    Having wiki availability with an internet connection is not overly helpful; I'm not always online when I have to read up on a subject.

     

    But it is what it is and I suppose it's what we have to work with.



  • 12.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 18, 2015 05:40 AM

    Documentation at wiki.ca.com/endevor
    easy to recall - takes me to the "wrong" version - even though I choose version 16 it doesn't cookie recall this.
    Jarring that it redirects to docops.ca.com - do you know how people bookmark favourites?

     

    Personally I'm not fully bought into online due to the speed - the majority of our user base is a good 12K miles from the source and you can pretty much bet that there's not a lot of caching going on for Endevor manuals on the internet - so it's fairly slow stuff.
    An offline PDF means we can store locally cascade cached copies making search a faster function.

     

    I'd like to continue the discussion of gunterr around the general availability of the documentation around administration / security and  installation.
    It's understood by many in the security industry that the mainframe is the next target of attack to directly access company and customer data.
    With this in mind - CA should be playing it's part of due diligence in an area that is highlighting how to guides of the inner workings of Endevor security.

     

    This could possibly be addressed by a quick fix of locking these document sets to authorised logons (ie not publically available) as is done with the API's & User Exits with the message:

    "Important! This information is restricted to CA Endevor SCM customers with CA Support Online access. Log in to view this information."
    Does CA have any kind of security around registering an account or do you just have to "know" a customer ID?

     

    BTW: Message search for CIGG503E doesn't find anything - add that to the glitch list



  • 13.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 18, 2015 08:36 AM

    I think we agree with a slight caveat, Steve.

     

    IF I am accessing the manuals online (which I am increasingly not a fan of), then your intercept for that information makes sense.

     

    However, online access is not always wanted, desired, or even a good idea from a customer "closed network" perspective, especially in companies or departments in high-sensitivity roles. In those situations, it is often imperative that they have soft or hard copies available of the different manuals that are relevant to different roles. From a usage perspective, nothing is more annoying than being restricted to internet network access (and not having it) when I need to look something up in a hurry... or on a plane... or on the bus...or a myriad of other times we are "offline" or have restricted access and need to bone up on information.

     

    I increasingly do not care for the mash up that occurred with the r18 manual into a single PDF document. Yes, I can search every manual at once and yes there are "breakdowns" by topic chapter (sort of), but paging back and forth to figure out the context of the hit on the search I just did is one major inconvenience.

     

    In my opinion, it made far more sense to break the books into functional covers along the lines that have always been the case. I fail to see nor can I figure out what the value was to the customer (us) in mashing together all the manuals into one big book.



  • 14.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 18, 2015 11:41 AM

    Hi Steve,

     

    You’ve touched on several issues in this email thread that others have also expressed concern about. I have some information to share…

     

    PDFs-- The Version 18 doc wiki will soon be updated for Incremental Release 2. At that time, downloadable PDFs will be provided for the individual subject areas (Using, Administrating, and so on) in addition to the PDF of the complete site that is provided now. Where you can find the individual PDFs will be announced when the doc is refreshed.

     

    Wiki.ca.com URLs-- The URL wiki.ca.com/endevor is a “persistent” URL that always redirects to the current version (V18) of the product documentation.  Either wiki.ca.com/endevor or docops.ca.com/endevor (also a persistent URL) will redirect to the current Endevor doc. The URL for the CA Technologies Documentation was very recently changed from wiki.ca.com to docops.ca.com. So, any wiki.ca.com URLs will now redirect to docops.ca.com pages.

     

    Locked down content—The API and User Exits content is locked down to protect the product for competitive reasons.  Otherwise from a security standpoint, it is assumed that anyone that wants to access the documentation content can find a way to do so, regardless of whether it is locked down on the docops platform. This is assumed for all CA product documentation across the docops platform.

     

    Regarding the message CIGG503E--There are no CIGG messages in the documentation, but there are C1G messages. The closest I could find to CIGG503E in the doc is C1G0503E ELEMENT IS UNAVAILABLE - RESERVED BY PKG package id. Is that what you were looking for? If not, let me know and I’ll ask Support.

     

    Margaret



  • 15.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Jan 21, 2016 08:18 AM

    Hi Margaret,

     

    The Wiki has been update to V18 Incremental release 3 now and I see a Print PDF on the Incr3 page (which still prints the entire thing to PDF).

    Going to the standard V18 - there is no EPUB or PDF link to download the manuals - just a link to support. I went there and V18 isn't listed as a documentation set I can download - from this link: SAP Portal Services  only V16/V17 are available - can you check where the individual manuals are you mentioned ?

     

    I'd prefer everything in one place and it seems I spend a lot of time jumping between CA sites that provide -some- of the information I need.

    I'm confused why you have two domains registered wiki.ca.com and docops.ca.com (that sounds very much like devops!) that are both pointing at the same content.

    What is the intention here - do you plan to demise one of them?

     

    Steve.



  • 16.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Jan 21, 2016 11:52 AM

    Hi Steve,

     

    Individual PDFs are now available on the CA Endevor SCM - 18.0 space. See the Downloadable PDFs page in Release Information. The CA Endevor SCM - 18.0 space is the official doc space for V18 and it has been refreshed to include the Incremental Release 2 enhancements. The draft space, CA Endevor SCM - 18.0 INCR3 DRAFT, includes information about the enhancements under development, which are subject to change.

     

    To clarify my previous comment about "wiki.ca.com"-- the documentation is posted on "docops.ca.com." The "wiki.ca.com" URL is obsolete and has been replaced by "docops.ca.com," but wiki.ca.com will redirect to docops.ca.com for a few more months.

    The URL was changed because the term "DocOps" is closely related to "DevOps" and more accurately describes the new documentation platform--

    "DocOps means crowdsourced, single-sourced software documentation housed in a central repository – in our case, a wiki-based platform. DocOps means documentation that is developed and released in lockstep with DevOps applications." For more information about docops, see the article: DocOps: Intelligent Content for the Application Economy

     

    Margaret



  • 17.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jan 22, 2016 08:07 AM

    Hi Margaret,

     

    The individual PDF is a great idea, I'm happy it is available now.

    Many Thanks for this enhancement.

     

    Regards,

    Ollivier



  • 18.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 25, 2015 12:37 PM

    Hi John,

     

      I took a look at the documentation and really like the way it works.  I especially like that if I search on a keyword or topic, it will return all instances that previously would require me to perform the search in multiple books.  I give it a thumbs up.  :-)

     

    Janet



  • 19.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Nov 25, 2015 04:15 PM

    That is great news Janet, perhaps the wiki is a love it or hate it tool.

     

    I don't always have a live internet connection and am used to having the PDF documents on an IOS tablet for use.

     

    Stuart



  • 20.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Mar 16, 2016 12:41 PM

    Is this just me or the way docops.ca.com/endevor works ?

     

    My two primary issues are:

    1) I randomly get pushed to a logon page when trying to access the URL (is this because I've previously logged on - cookie related?)

    2) I search for an error message on the main page (eg SMGR082E) - no results found. I have to click Message and Code Reference and then (I can't believe I am typing this - another search box appears - two search boxes now - the error message is located by using the second box. Search appears fundamentally flawed unless the idea is just to use Google?

    Boxes.JPG



  • 21.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Mar 16, 2016 01:22 PM

    HI Steve,

     

    I think this might be related to your sign-in/-out problem.  Some content is not available if you're not signed in, and you will get signed out automatically after a period of inactivity.

    I just did a search from the Main (Bookshelf) search box and it worked perfectly...

    Screen Shot 2016-03-16 at 17.10.11.png



  • 22.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Mar 16, 2016 06:25 PM

    Hi Steve,

    You are automatically logged out after a period of time. However, you do not have to be logged in to see the most of the content. Only the API and Exits Reference content requires log in.

    For technical reasons, the main search box does not work for messages. Because the number of messages is so large, the message content is located in a separate space on the docops platform. If it was in the same space as the rest of the Endevor content, it would slow searches of the other content considerably. The easiest way to get to the messages is to use the search box in the message search box on the home page:

     



  • 23.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Mar 17, 2016 10:31 AM

    Margaret, Eoin,

     

    Thanks for your replies to what is a terribly frustrating situation as an end user. I spend my days logging in (and being automatically logged out (I am guessing).

     

    What is this "period of time" you refer to for automatic logoff?

     

    Why am I forced back to logon when I have been automatically logged off? According to Eoin I would be able to perform the search if I wasn't logged on but Margaret says this isn't possible due to the number of messages ?

     

    Is anyone else experiencing these issues or are most people using PDF's?



  • 24.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Mar 17, 2016 03:17 PM

    Hi Steve,

    Sorry I did not make it clear... You do NOT have to be logged in to view messages.

    It is because there are so many messages that you have to use a search box that is for messages only, instead of the main search box.

    For more information, see How to Search for Messages, which I just added on the Messages and Codes page. 

     

    I don't know what the exact timeout limit is for the automatic logoff. In my experience, I get timed out after about 20 minutes of inactivity.  I have asked our technical team if they can enhance the wiki to return users who are automatically logged out back to the page they were on when they were logged out. I am waiting for their answer.



  • 25.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Dec 24, 2015 01:31 PM

    Hi everybody

     

    The part that I do not like is when you save the entire manual as a PDF and then open the PDF, all the bookmarks are expanded out. I can collapse the top level bookmarks but I have not been able to find how to collapse all bookmarks

    I find I'm spending most of my time in the PDF collapsing bookmarks just to find the section I want

     

    If I go through and collapse everything and then re-save it, the bookmarks are collapsed, but why should I have to go through that effort



  • 26.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Jan 04, 2016 02:27 PM

    Hi David,

     

    Thanks for mentioning this issue (I find it annoying too).

    I've asked Engineering Services about this and they are looking into whether there is a setting they can change that will collapse the bookmarks during the generation of the PDFs.

     

    In the meantime, you might try this workaround, which works for me. Note that the NUM_DIVIDE and NUM_MULIPLY keys will depend on the keyboard you are using.

    - First click to select any bookmark (in the left column)
    - Press SHIFT + NUM_DIVIDE to collapse all bookmarks
    - Press SHIFT + NUM_MULTIPLY to expand all bookmarks

     

    Thanks,



  • 27.  Re: r18 Documentation - Anybody else taken a look yet?

    Posted Mar 24, 2016 11:50 AM

    I think the authorization is based in part on the user's site id.  So if someone is assigned to more than one site ID then this program utilizes one of them.  If the site ID the program utilizes is not the site ID associated with ENDEVOR SCM then you are not authorized to see the ENDEVOR SCM administration books.  If this is true then my suggestion is to add a drop down box to allow the users to select their site ID when they have more than one.  Alternatively, even better, maybe the program can automatically identify the site ID that grants the most privileges and use that one.  I resolved this problem by requesting that my second site ID be deleted, but that may not be a good solution for everyone.