Documentation for IT solutions using the custom Eclipse Information Center, part 1th

Part 1th: Create your first Information center

Overview

The process of implementing IT solutions involves integrating and customizing a variety of hardware and software components. To organize a "maintenance guide" for an implemented solution, related documentation and other technical information may involve multiple authors, document locations, and document formats-ranging from traditional teamrooms and official documents, forums, blogs, and wikis. It takes a lot of work to collect, organize, and deliver these documents to your customers (or bosses, teams), but it's also a laborious task if you are not good at such tasks. The other option is to provide insufficient documentation, and its disadvantage is that it increases support costs, fails to efficiently utilize productivity, and compromises customer information.

This article describes a toolbox that can help individuals or project teams quickly complete the task of documenting the IT solution. If you used to document your IT solution by recording a list of links or by collating a ZIP file of useful documents, then consider spending the same time building a solution information center, which will grow incrementally until the lifecycle of the solution is completed, and technologies such as RSS feeds are incorporated to keep the information time-sensitive.

This toolbox encapsulates the best practices for designing, architecting, and delivering information to templates and automation routines, which means that it does not require skills in user experience, information development, or Eclipse plug-in coding. The Toolbox is implemented on Eclipse's rich client platform and generates standard Eclipse document Plug-ins, but you can use the Toolbox without installing the Toolkit integrated development environment.

Results: Customized information Centers

Provides customers with a portable, self-contained information center that can be accessed on either the Intranet or the Internet on a local or remote desktop. As shown in Figure 1, the Information Center navigation, home page, and browser titles can be customized for specific solutions.

Figure 1. Project Zero WebSphere sMash Skill Pack

If you deliver the solution Information Center and the project that is used to create it, the recipient can extend the information center through more documents throughout the solution life cycle. The Toolbox for developing and updating custom solution information Centers is available free of charge from Ibm®alphaworks.

Method: Toolbox with Easy-to-use graphical user interface

The Toolkit for Custom and reusable Solution from Alphaworks helps you build an information center that enables customer delivery or team member sharing. When you start the Solution Information Project, a graphical navigation tree is displayed where you can drag information, such as a presentation file. You will soon have components that make up a task-oriented solution Information Center and do not require information development or user experience skills. You can export a self-contained information center for your customers to run on top of your desktop, Intranet, or Internet.