IBM Product naming standards

Question: How do I communicate IBM product versions to other team members?

There are many ways to obtain IBM products. These options include:

• Online software catalog
• Purchase directly from IBM partner (usually at discount)
• Passport Advantage volume discount program
• Partnerworld (for developers affiliated with IBM)

The product will consist of an eAssembly or a collection of images. The distinction of the terms is that an eAssembly is a collection of images, and each image would be distributed on physical media that corresponds to a CD or DVD. (Good luck finding any documentation that tells you this explicitly.)

An IBM part number is assigned to every eAssembly and image. Most of the time you say the word product you will want to use the part number that corresponds to the eAssembly. The images will often be included in many different eAssemblies.

The topic that is bothering me today is the tremendous variation in the title of the product as presented through partnerworld. Consider this example table which lists the various releases of WebSphere Portal Factory as listed in a partnerworld text search using the term portlet factory.

Name	Part Number	Size	Date Posted
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory, v5.12, Windows Server 2000, 2003, Sun Solaris 8, IBM AIX 5.1, IBM OS/400 V5R2, Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 8.x, SUSE Linux 9.2 US English eAssembly	CR3KZNA	186mb	30-Mar-2006
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer, v5.12, Windows Server 2000, 2003, Sun Solaris 8, IBM AIX 5.1, IBM OS/400 V5R2, Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 8.x, SUSE Linux 9.2 US English eAssembly	CR3L0NA	186mb	30-Mar-2006
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer V6.0 Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly	CR3WQML	231mb	26-Jul-2006
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory V6.0 Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly	CR3WPML	231mb	26-Jul-2006
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer V6.0.1 Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly	CR4WRML	246mb	12-Mar-2007
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer V6.0.2 Multilingual Multiplatform	CR5NDML	324mb	13-Nov-2007
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and Portlet Factory Designer V6.1.0 Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly	CR78SML	516mb	27-Jun-2008
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and Portlet Factory Designer V6.1.2 Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly	CR874ML	589mb	12-Dec-2008

NOTE: I sorted this example by date, which is not an option in the web interface. Also the web interface does not present the information as a table.

The point of the table above is that names and product numbers don't seem to follow any standard at all. Each of those entries is referring to a release of the same product. I picked this product because it contains a relatively small number of search results.

The part number of the eAssembly must be recorded to guarantee consistency among team members. In other words, don't tell somebody to install WPF 6.0.1. Instead tell them to install part number CR4WRML.

A future post will discuss the various support patches naming standards.

Explaining IBM product research

Question: How do I research a particular IBM product?

Let's suppose that you want to know all about Rational Application Developer. This is the standard IDE for WebSphere development that is based on the open source Eclipse platform.

The first thing you want to find is what I will loosely call the Product Home Page. The product home page for RAD is the Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Development page. You find the product home page by starting at the IBM home page. You select Products > Software > Products from the menu system. This will bring you to the IBM Software Product Finder screen which present various methods for searching. The search results of this page will always list a Learn About link that directs you to the Product Home Page.

The Product Home Page contains links and information about the product. The audience for this page is a business user evaluating the purchase of the product.

A developer interested in finding technical information on the product cannot ignore this page. The single biggest resource for a developer is the Product Library link. This page will contain an extensive (but not exhaustive) listing of information resources.

A developer with no familiarity with the product should probably rank the resources in the following order:

1. Redbooks
2. Information Center
3. Developerworks articles
4. Product wiki
5. Product forum
6. Product webcasts
7. Product technotes
   

Please note that the above is not an exhaustive list of resource types. The authors of these various resources vary in skill and familiarity with the product. This means that the ranking can change by product. The products are also constantly changing and invalidating older posts. My experience is that IBM almost never links updates from obsolete information to the current information. That step is up to the developer.

Any software development project should have some team bulletin board. This might be a wiki, a sharepoint site, a quikr site, etc. The most prominent feature of this site should be the Documentation Library which lists online links to the product documentation consulted while developing. I mention this because the developer will be creating a private and specific listing of resources found on the Product Home Page. By the time you get down to developerworks articles you will notice that they always have links to resources themselves. You should list the helpful ones in your own Documentation Library. You will quickly get to the point where the resources all reference each other.

Mission Statement

This blog will capture my musings and research regarding various technologies. The posts will be educational and will rely heavily on third-party sources with a running commentary on their significance.

All errors are the fault of the reader.