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| zpat |
 Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2010 11:05 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Council
Joined: 19 May 2001
Posts: 5866
Location: UK
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| Thanks, I find it harder to locate information now that IBM have stopped providing proper manuals in PDF format. |
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| Vitor |
| Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2010 11:24 am Post subject: |
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Grand High Poobah
Joined: 11 Nov 2005
Posts: 26093
Location: Texas, USA
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| zpat wrote: |
| I find it harder to locate information now that IBM have stopped providing proper manuals in PDF format. |
Forced to disagree with you - I find the online centre just as good (especially as, if you know what manual you should start with, it's laid out like the PDFs).
I also thought the PDFs were still available in the Publications area?
_________________
Honesty is the best policy.
Insanity is the best defence. |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2010 12:08 pm Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| Vitor wrote: |
| zpat wrote: |
| I find it harder to locate information now that IBM have stopped providing proper manuals in PDF format. |
Forced to disagree with you - I find the online centre just as good (especially as, if you know what manual you should start with, it's laid out like the PDFs).
I also thought the PDFs were still available in the Publications area? |
No PDFs are produced for MQ v7 or Broker v7. Older PDFs are still available.
I've always found the InfoCenters to be more searchable and more reusable than the PDFs. |
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| George Carey |
| Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 10:34 am Post subject: reading |
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Knight
Joined: 29 Jan 2007
Posts: 500
Location: DC
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What if you just wanted to do some reading ... a PDF is the way to do it(next to a book anyway). A hyperlinked ... document is tedious to painful to 'read' if you can call it that.
It is a WIKI model useful for searching perhaps but if you wish to read in length and detail ... you want a book format ... not a busted up set of synopsized content snippets.
_________________
"Truth is ... grasping the virtually unconditioned",
Bernard F. Lonergan S.J.
(from book titled "Insight" subtitled "A Study of Human Understanding") |
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| exerk |
| Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 12:00 pm Post subject: |
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Jedi Council
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Posts: 6339
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The Info Centres (both V6.0 and V7.0) are downloadable...
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It's puzzling, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this before...and it's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys. |
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| George Carey |
| Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:24 pm Post subject: still the same |
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Knight
Joined: 29 Jan 2007
Posts: 500
Location: DC
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Downloading
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| "... busted up set of synopsized content snippets. ..." |
doesn't help the reading experience.
I thought someone said PDF's of the former manuals were buried in the info-centers somewhere. Was that only for earlier version and not current ?
_________________
"Truth is ... grasping the virtually unconditioned",
Bernard F. Lonergan S.J.
(from book titled "Insight" subtitled "A Study of Human Understanding") |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 2:13 am Post subject: Re: still the same |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| PeterPotkay |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:00 am Post subject: |
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Poobah
Joined: 15 May 2001
Posts: 7722
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You can get WMQ 7 and WMB 7 Redbooks in PDF format.
I want my manuals both ways - Info Center and PDFs. Oh well, them were the good ol' days.
_________________
Peter Potkay
Keep Calm and MQ On |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:29 am Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| PeterPotkay wrote: |
| You can get WMQ 7 and WMB 7 Redbooks in PDF format. |
Yes, but not manuals.
Redbooks != manuals. |
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| George Carey |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 8:56 am Post subject: != indeed |
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Knight
Joined: 29 Jan 2007
Posts: 500
Location: DC
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Yes Redbooks(while at times useful) are not definitive nor authoritative.
So MQ manuals are not equal to MQ Redbooks ... correct.
It would seem that a customer focused corporation as IBM 'strives' to be would accommodate both the Infocentre and electronic Manuals (Admin Guide, Programming Ref., etc.) as they would and could be maintained with minimal cost overhead. The edit changes from version to version I have to believe are vanishingly small compared to IBM's overall expenses.
Yet the value to the customers as voiced on many occasions and many different voices convey a valuable asset in their being maintained. So where is the corporate systemic conveyance of this customer wish/desire/want/need carried forward or ignored. Putting one's finger on that is putting one's finger on corporate bureaucracy in general .
An effectively no cost item to maintain and store and distribute that is of declared value to its customers by its customers is discarded ??!!
Please don't tell me privatized bureaucracy is the solution for governmental bureaucracy.
(A bit of a journey to go from MQ manuals to political philosophies  )
_________________
"Truth is ... grasping the virtually unconditioned",
Bernard F. Lonergan S.J.
(from book titled "Insight" subtitled "A Study of Human Understanding") |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 9:48 am Post subject: Re: != indeed |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| George Carey wrote: |
| An effectively no cost item to maintain and store and distribute that is of declared value to its customers by its customers is discarded ??!! |
It is not my understanding that this is a zero-cost item. It takes specific kinds of software and more importantly (or at least, more expensively) it takes people time.
There is also the significant difficulty with PDFs in that the content is static, and it can be very difficult to know just by looking at the PDF itself whether or not it is still current or relevant.
This is also true of local copies of the InfoCenter - but at least there you have a better chance of being able to eyeball-compare pages with the live version. Where is page 96 of the ESQL manual in the InfoCenter again? |
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| George Carey |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 10:35 am Post subject: create vs maintain |
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Knight
Joined: 29 Jan 2007
Posts: 500
Location: DC
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Initial cost to create the PDF set of manuals likely great.
Cost to maintain, likely as I say, vanishingly small by comparison even with editorial staff head count included. Not zero but relatively zero!
Cost to stop maintenance, then realize it was a mistake and start it up much later, also likely great. (and then becomes cost prohibitive!)
If IBM maintains the gold PDF images and control the updates to it(Its called version control), then to determine whether you have a current image is a matter of checking a date of last update. If you think you are sufficiently out of date ... you download a latest version !! This is hard? This is difficult to assess ?
Analogy to creating a major edifice of almost any kind, lets say the Golden Gate Bridge. Initial capital investment enormous. Operating costs to maintain, a paint job, inspections and updates for wear and tear. Pdfs, no paint needed but occasional updates needed but without the wear and tear. Vanishingly small compared to initial investment. And the Bridge is still valuable despite other bridges being built for additional needs as are the Manuals.
_________________
"Truth is ... grasping the virtually unconditioned",
Bernard F. Lonergan S.J.
(from book titled "Insight" subtitled "A Study of Human Understanding") |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 10:57 am Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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George - your opinions do not match what I have been told by the people in charge of these things.
This was not a zero cost item to maintain, nor a comparatively low cost item to maintain. It required additional software licenses, and an entirely additional deployment process, that involved multiple people.
And being able to produce a "book" format of highly indexed and discrete chunks of documentation had significant impact on the nature of the repository used to store the content in the first place.
The decision to cease duplicating the InfoCenter content into a PDF formatted document was not, as I understand it, taken lightly nor on a whim.
Nor was it made without understanding that this would impact customers.
I do not deny that I have always been a big advocate of the InfoCenter over the PDF form of the documentation. But then, I'm a big advocate of the gasoline engine over a three-horse draycart as well. |
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| gbaddeley |
| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 5:21 pm Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 25 Mar 2003
Posts: 2538
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Are there any other vendors that have scrapped PDFs for product manuals, in favour of an online / HTML presentation? It would be an interesting exercise to take the downloadable infocenter and write a tool to convert the myriad of HTML files into a workable set of PDFs.
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Glenn |
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| mqjeff |
| Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2010 2:30 am Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
Posts: 17447
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| gbaddeley wrote: |
| Are there any other vendors that have scrapped PDFs for product manuals, in favour of an online / HTML presentation? It would be an interesting exercise to take the downloadable infocenter and write a tool to convert the myriad of HTML files into a workable set of PDFs. |
Many vendors don't even make their documentation freely available on the web in the first place.
Oracle certainly makes both PDFs and searchable HTML pages available.
Microsoft does not have PDF/book format docus available at least for their programming stuff - I've not checked on things like Office. |
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