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.