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Tuesday Aug 05, 2008
Sun Grid Engine 6.2 (What I Have Been Doing Lately)
Since my last post in May, I have been busy with the folks in Regensburg (and elsewhere) putting together the latest Sun Grid Engine release. Today, the product releases and I can finally talk about it. 
From a product perspective, Sun Grid Engine 6.2 has several improvements and one major new feature. The significant new feature, Service Domain Manager (SDM), enables you to move resources between Sun Grid Engine clusters. Read more about SDM.
From my perspective, the most important change in this release is that we moved all the information from docs.sun.com to wikis.sun.com. There are many reasons why we decided to move the information to a wiki, but I will only discuss my top two.
- Participation - It has always been difficult to get good feedback on information products. Although we have done surveys and held customer focus groups, we rarely get enough focused information on specific pages. Similarly, engineers often find it difficult to provide technical feedback at exactly the time when we need to have that feedback. The wiki helps. Anyone can comment on the information directly, and engineering can provide technical feedback when they have a few free minutes. In the case of the Sun Grid Engine wiki, several of the engineers have even taken on the burden of changing the technical content in the pages directly.
- Responsiveness - To change information on docs.sun.com involves several steps, each of which takes time. Even if everything goes well, it takes at least several hours to fix a simple typo. On the wiki, it takes only a minute or two to fix the same typo. Of course, in either environment, additional time is needed to confirm a technical change or to craft appropriate verbiage for a description. However, that time is the same in both models. Actually making the change on the wiki is much faster.
Is the wiki perfect? No. Is it our "last, best hope" for an information solution? No. But, it is progress for Sun Grid Engine. In addition to improved responsiveness and the ability to collaborate, we took the opportunity to fix some long-standing problems with the information content itself. Much of the old content was lifted literally from product specifications. Rather than explaining how to perform a task, it described how the software implemented the features. Although we did not rewrite every sentence in the information, we did rewrite a significant amount (probably 50%). We were also able to reorganize information to make more sense and to remove duplicated information. We have more to do, but it's exciting to be able to do something that has immediate visibility and to which our customers can respond directly.
Posted at 10:42AM Aug 05, 2008 by jcinfoblog in General | Comments[0]