The Docs.sun.com blog

Linking to docs.sun.com content demystified

Sometimes it is useful to link to content on docs.sun.com, and in large part you can do so without much worry that the link will go away at some point. Almost everything that has ever been published to docs.sun.com is still there, at the same URL that it ever was. However, there are a few things to be aware of when linking, especially to specific content pages inside of books. It is helpful to recognize the type of content being linked to, and the origin of the actual link target identifier.[Read More]

Posted at 07:04PM Jul 15, 2008 by docsblogger in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Upcoming Features on docs.sun.com

As part of the continuing mission of docs.sun.com to provide easy and straightforward access to Sun Microsystem's technical documentation we are currently working on the next release of the online application, currently called docs.sun.com 4.2.7. This new release contains features that will further improve how docs.sun.com works with search engines and add new controls to the interface for a n umber of frequently requested features.

The 4.2.7 release of docs.sun.com has three main themes:

• Better Searching
• Faster Information Access
• Increased Visibility of Localized Content [See also »]

To achieve these goals, a number of improvements are underway and should begin appearing on docs.sun.com over the next few weeks.

1. Additional metadata is being added to all the pages served by docs.sun.com. This metadata will allow for search systems, including Sun's own Sun Search as well as many other search sites that cur rently index docs.sun.com content, to group and filter hit lists based upon your needs. For example, we will re-introduce the ability to limit search returns to specific collections of documents an d speed up your search activities.
2. A number of requests have been submitted to us asking for the ability to rapidly download content from docs.sun.com, including document collections and sets about the many products that Sun offer s. You'll soon be able to download PDF file sets in zip format that including everything about a specific product, and install them locally for offline access to docs.sun.com content. Additionally, you can keep yourself informed about new content through RSS feeds detailing changes and additions to product documentation.
3. Although docs.sun.com has had a large number of documents in languages other than English for many years, sometimes it can be a bit frustrating get to that content. We are introducing the ability to go from any of the dynamically generated documents on docs.sun.com to translations of those documents using a new menu on content pages.
• Note: Read More about this feature.

Look for these changes to be available in the middle of June, 2008. We continue to strive to make docs.sun.com one of the best product documentation sites on the web and welcome your feedback.

Posted at 12:40PM May 27, 2008 by docsblogger in Sun  | 

How Many People visit Docs.sun.com?

Our goal at Docs.sun.com is to be “The Place” to go when you need to find documentation. We store more than 20,000 documents on Sun's hardware and software product families./

Our site traffic records show over the past 12 months the number of *weekly unique visitors* to DSC has grown from 115,000 back in May 2007 to 180,000. in April 2008. 56% growth year on year, certainly a significant increase!/

What does this tell us?

We believe its a clear indication that our customers are finding what they need on docs; the application has stabilized and is performing well and we are increasing our level of service to the customer./

As you can read elsewhere on this blog site, we are making improvements to our search capabilities and adding new features to make your experience at Docs.sun.com a valuable one./

Posted at 12:11PM May 12, 2008 by Susan Kober in Sun  | 

Service Delivery Tools Suite

On April 8th, 2008 the Proactive Services Team led by Felix Fraters announced the roadmap for the Service Delivery Tools Suite, which is the answer to proactive / reactive service delivery to our connected as well as disconnected customers. The long term plans' to tentatively occur in Q3/FY09 – Q4FY09, most substantial element are the components of C2S2 (Contained Customer Support Suite).

• A product suite developed by support services to assist the contained customer and Sun-badged personnel acting as an on-site support staff perform proactive as well as reactive service delivery.
• Provides these disconnected customers and staff with critical functionality that is readily available to the connected customer with network connectivity outside of their own four-walls.
• Enables a one-stop solution which complies to the customer's own security constraints.
• Provides internal knowledge store and tools to adequately support systems and software.
What makes a disconnected customer disconnected? There are varying degrees of disconnected, some of the properties are:
• No external network connectivity back to Sun.
• No outbound transference of digital media
• Inbound transference of digital media is highly controlled physical process (sneaker-net)
• Internally networks of varying security levels are supported and maintained seperately.
• Enormous number of Sun servers supported in these environments.
• Security is paramount to protect the information contained on these mission systems.
What are the elements of C2S2?
• Management Center
• Product Telemetry Processing
• Support Knowledge Store
• Documentation
• Software
• Entitlement Reporting
We are taking Sun to the customer in C2S2!

Posted at 01:52PM Apr 22, 2008 by Susan Kober in Sun  | 

Thanks for your feedback!

The documentation folks at Sun are pleased you are taking time to give feedback on documents. If you give us your email in the feedback form, you will hear back from a documentation writer. All comments received from docs.sun.com are routed to the writers who own the content. We'll let you know what we are doing with your comment. So far we've received technical corrections, content suggestions, thanks, and, yes, some frustration. We take every comment seriously so please keep sending them our way! So look for the [+] Feedback icons on the top and bottom of each page and let us know what you think!

Posted at 12:28PM Apr 15, 2008 by Susan Kober in Sun  | 

Data corruption solved

There was a rather serious problem that developed in the database that supports docs.sun.com and many of the documents that had been published over the last 72 hours were damaged in one way or another. The root cause has been found and corrected. We had to have a brief outage (less than 5 minutes) to apply a patch to the database but at this point we are fairly confident that the data is now valid and any SQL errors that the application was generating have stopped. If you continue to experience problems please let us know through the site Feedback system located on every docs.sun.com system page. Thank you for your continued support. docs.sun.com Engineering

Posted at 12:08PM Apr 03, 2008 by docsblogger in Sun  | 

Language Selection Issue

Over the past couple of days, we had an issue with the drop down list for language selection.
This list is controlled by a piece of Javascript.

The issue didn't appear on all platforms.

It turned out that a separate, newly added piece of Javascript interfered with the language list.

Anyhow, yesterday the issue was resolved, and the language selection is now working again.

Apologies if you were inconvenienced.

By the way, you can always change your language settings by modifying the URL.

To change to, say the Japanese user interface, you merely need to append the URL parameter "l=ja", where the "l" is for language.

So, while http://docs.sun.com/app/docs will typically give you the English user interface, by using http://docs.sun.com/app/docs?l=ja, you can access the Japanese user interface.

Other language codes include: en, de, es, fr, it, ko, pt-BR, ru, sv, zh, zh_TW

Note, that while the user interface is available in many languages, not all books are available in these languages.

Posted at 09:15AM Apr 02, 2008 by MickM in Sun  | 

Docs.sun.com wants your feedback!!

We have had our share of performance challenges in the past few months, but we have worked on stabilizing the application and we are working on a series of enhancements to make the user experience better. As you can read below, we are rolling out improved search capabilities over the next few weeks and we have future plans to continue to make docs.sun.com the place to go when you need information.

It was and will continue to be our customers who point us in the direction for improvements and enhancements, so we want your feedback,and in order to do that we've improved our ability to process your specific site feedback by implementing a robust third party feedback system.

Your content comments will be automatically routed to the owners of the content. And if there are any problems with PDF downloads or performance, we will be notified right away.

By incorporating this new feedback mechanism [+] we hope to improve the quality of communication, products and services delivered to our stakeholders. Having access to your collective comments and integrating those ideas into our strategic business process is critical to continuous improvement.

So look for the [+] and let us know what you think.

Posted at 10:28AM Mar 20, 2008 by docsblogger in Sun  | 

Docs.sun.com focuses on search improvements!

Based on what we've heard from our stakeholders, docs.sun.com is making improving search a top priority. Overwhelmingly, the top two areas stakeholders want improved are:

• You want to be able to search within a collection.
• You want us to improve the relevancy of search results

So what are we doing to address your concerns?

First, we are working with our publishers to increase and improve the level of metadata that describes our documents. We've completed a focused study which has specific recommendations for improvements. The Docs.sun.com Engineering Team will be working hand in hand with the publishing community to implement these recommendations.

In late March, Docs.sun.com will roll out a release with enhancements that will improve the accuracy of searching for content within a book. We will be providing page-specific titles vs. today's method of describing every page with the main title of the book. For example, instead of getting a page full of hits all with the same title of 'Solaris ZFS Administration Guide' when searching for 'ZFS information', each hit listed will have a meaningful title to show what that particular page is about in order to assist you in locating the information you need quickly.

In addition, the March release will bring improvements that will ensure the documents in your selected language preference will be returned from your searches. We'll implement some preliminary changes that will set us up to allow you to search within a collection in soon thereafter.

We will keep you posted as these improvements are released and will look forward to hearing what you think!

Posted at 04:22PM Feb 22, 2008 by docsblogger in Personal  | 

PDF download outage

End of PDF outage notification and information
PDFs are again available from dlc.sun.com. Additional information on the outage can be found within.
[Read More]

Posted at 09:26AM Feb 04, 2008 by docsblogger in Sun  | 

Information on the 9th of January service interruption

There was a service interruption of docs.sun.com beginning at 15:01 GMT due to a problem with the database that supports the site resulting in multiple server errors. We have repaired the problem and service has resumed. We apologize for the trouble and inconvenience this may have caused.

Posted at 08:37AM Jan 09, 2008 by docsblogger in Sun  | 

Recent improvements we've made to our site

We'd like to let you know about some of the recent improvements we've made to our site...

Performance:

As any user of docs.sun.com in recent months can tell you, we've been plagued by performance problems. We know it's been painful and we thank you for sticking by us as we worked to fix the problems. We can finally state with confidence that you will be seeing improved performance on the site from this time forward. What have we done to fix things? We've done several things: upgraded our hardware, moved to a new hosting facility, and determined that our most recent issues were due to a very hard to track-down firewall configuration issue.

New Feedback Mechanism:

As of last week, we've improved our ability to process your specific site feedback via the Send Comments link on the home page. We've put in place a different mechanism that allows us to better filter out spam and more quickly get to the heart of the issues our users are experiencing. We've also got a better process in place for responding to your comments, so you can rest assured that your feedback will not go unnoticed and unanswered.

And now turning our attention to Search...

Back in July, we implemented a new search mechanism on the site. Some have told us that they really like the new search functionality. Other feedback has been decidedly negative. We'd like to know what you think. Are you finding what you need using our new search mechanism? If not, what would you like to see work differently? Again, please post specific search bugs to the feedback link we've given above. We'd like to use the blog to gather overall impressions of what's working well and what's not with the new search mechanism.

Over the next month or so, we'll be evaluating whether changes need to be made to search, and, if so, what we can do to make them happen for you. Your feedback is important. Please chime in.

Posted at 01:38PM Nov 29, 2007 by docsblogger in Sun  | 

Introducing the docs.sun.com blog...

Welcome docs.sun.com users to docs.sun.com's new blog space. Why have we created a blog? We want you, our user community, to have better information on what's happening with our site. In addition, we'd like to open a dialogue with you as we continue to improve the site. We want to know what's important to you.

What this blog is: A place to find out the latest news and work going on to improve docs.sun.com. It's a place for you to let us know what you think of docs.sun.com and where you'd like to see it go in the future.

What this blog is not: A place to post site feedback reporting bugs or broken links, nor questions or problems about specific documents. To do this, please go to our Send Comments page.

Who will be writing and responding to comments on this blog? This blog will be authored by members of the docs.sun.com core team which includes representation from both engineering and the authors who publish content on the site. We'll be working to add new news every few weeks at a minimum, so check back to keep up to date on the latest happenings.

In summary, we're looking forward to an open dialogue with you to help us provide the Sun product documentation you need in a way that's most useful to you. Please let us know if there are specific topics you'd like to see addressed here. Welcome to the new docs.sun.com blog and thanks in advance for becoming an active member of our community!

Posted at 01:36PM Nov 29, 2007 by docsblogger in Sun  |