OpenSolaris.org Content: A Writer's Weblog

The information product team that is responsible for technical documentation and training spent three days last week hearing from N1 stakeholders. It was a unique opportunity to gather and discuss the information that supports the N1 product line.

We listened to stakeholder feedback during the first day, heard from the N1 CTO on the second day and did brainstorming activities in teams. And on the third day I rested

There was wrap-up in Broomfield, the site of the offsite. I missed this part in favor of a previously planned kayaking trip to Del Norte county, CA. I highly recommend such an outing after a long week of concalls and 'theory work' to come up with new ways to teach users about Sun products in the systems management space. Big trees provided awesome shelter from hard rains on our tent and fireside serenity made way for stargazing and planet watching.

During the summit we discussed new ways to participate in the community around us. We talked through the coming year and the complexities of creating a model for learning and teaching the community to use N1 products to build out data centers.

We found that, in addition to technical information about supported configurations and functionality, the biggest improvement to our content would be real-world data and examples for use in the field. The challenge is to provide information that describes high-scale monitoring, provisioning, and maintenance an order-of-magnitude greater than the industry has seen before. No pressure. This is only priority 1.

While that is cooking, I will begin to add new types of content that fill in other holes in the N1 documentation picture by using my weblog. These pieces will be in support of system administrators using the Sun N1 System Manager. They will attempt to provide a newly paved two-way street to formal tech doc authors (me) and new users of N1SM 1.1 (maybe you?). Community building. This is the most fun.