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.