Factotum: Documentation Handyman

We've been talking internally about putting together a page of useful Communications Suite tools to help you better manage your Comms deployments. It will be a while before we get this page (site, wiki, whatever) off the ground, but in the meantime, the discussion got me thinking about searching for Comms Suite information. Sure, we all use Google, but how many of us are using Google coop, which enables you to construct customized web searches of only the sites you want?

Here are two Google coop examples that Sun employees have thrown together:

• Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Search Engine, which searches for information on the current Messaging Server release. (This would be an example of a fairly targetted coop.)
• Communications Suite Search Engine, which searches for information for all Comms products for all releases. (This would be an example of a fairly broad google coop, at least for Comms products.)

What really rocks with Google coop is the ability to tweak your searches, adding or subtracting sites over time, to finetune what you are looking for.

You can also use Sun's onesearch, to search across all Sun sites, including forums, blogs, and wikis. Here's a sample onesearch on "installing messaging server 6.3:"

Whatever your search engine choice, it's obvious customers rely on searching as the primary means of obtaining information. And we need to keep this in mind as we move forwards with newer documentation efforts, such as the Comms Doc Wiki, which we are cooking up for the next release.