VMwarewolfHelp the Knowledgebase Team
Here’s a post in which you can help VMware. As you may know I am currently working in the Knowledge Management team at VMware. We are responsible for all content in kb.vmware.com We are constantly looking for ways to improve the value and usability of the knowledgebase for customers. Being searchable in Google is one thing already being worked on.
I’d like to ask each of you, “How can VMware best improve its Knowledgbase?”
Drop a comment in the box below. I’ll make sure all good ideas are presented to the team for discussion.
Knowledge Base, VMware December 16th. 2008, 12:07pm
December 16th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Some good URL rewriting to allow simple linking. It does work now http://kb.vmware.com/kb/878 but is not well know and not used by the system itself. You have to rewrite them by hand (as far as I know).
December 16th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Hi,
Firstly, I’d like to tell you that I’m a massive fan of both your web site and your emails. Those KB files you’ve been sending are just fantastic.
One thing I sometimes find frustrating is that there’s no consistency in documents. I have to do a search for both esx and vmware and then the issue I have because sometimes documents refer to ESX server and sometimes to VMware. I don’t necessarily mean VMware KB’s but in general. So I would really like to see that kind of consistency in VMware KB articles.
Once again, thank you very much for all your efforts. They make my life so much easier.
Cheers
Goran
December 16th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Rodos,
URL rewriting is one of the first things I identified as being a barrier to getting KB content indexed by Google. Another problem is the use of iframes. It’s going to be a challenge to fix, but we’ll get there.
Goran,
Thanks for the kind words. We do make an effort to be consistent in naming in the knowledgebase. One of the challenges is that names change over time. Product management and marketing types love to update the names over time. Note to self – hit them hard in the head the next time I see them. Ooops – my inner voice there.
Another reason for this is that this position is rotational. I will only be authoring knowledgebase articles for another 3 months, then it will be another guy. This makes consistency difficult too.
January 9th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Maybe an expanded team to produce more content would help as well. It could also just be that I have a hard time finding solutions to isues inside the KB. I usually end up finding answers in the community forums. It would be a huge task but it may be worth finding common topics in the forum and either making KB articles out of them or connecting the forum posts to the KB or something
January 9th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
How about stealing from the bloggers and implementing tags? Tagging or adding keywords to articles, whitepapers etc would be huge. It would help initially finding things and finding other similar docs. Often times I may just know (or think I know) that it has something to do with hostd or the rcli or whatever. Just because a doc mentions hostd doesn’t mean I want or need to read about it. However if the article is about hostd enough so that it’s tagged as hostd that would help significantly.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:38 pm
How about a subscription facility. It would be nice if I could sign up (using specific criteria such as product w/version) to receive email alerts of new KB articles. I sometimes have trouble finding info because I didn’t put in my search criteria as the KB was expecting, thus no match. If the KB links are emailed to me and I just happen to review them, I bet I’ll find answers to issues I see.
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 pm
So that everyone knows, VMware currently has an RSS feed service which lets you customize which aspects of news you wish to receive here:
http://vmware.simplefeed.net/subscription
January 30th, 2009 at 11:09 am
How about a mechanism for providing feedback on KB articles other than “how was it?” There is a particular KB out there regarding VI Console lockups that says the answer is based on firewall settings. Not 100% true. I have a different solution, but since I do not have direct VM support (I go through HP), I do not know how to let support know there is another workaround. I have the same symptoms, but a different cause.
January 30th, 2009 at 11:12 am
One comment regarding RSS feeds – I already subscribe, but there is quite a bit of inconsistency regarding which KB articles get published via the feed. Sometimes I will get no KBs for weeks, and sometimes I’ll get nothing but KBs. When I don’t see any, I’ll often go to the website and search on recently published just to see if there are any new docs. There usually are a bunch.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:18 am
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February 6th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Hey Wolf, Is there a way to pare down the RSS Feed so that I only get KBs related to my products? We don’t use VDI, Lab Manager, SRM, so I would prefer not to get RSS links on them.
adam
February 7th, 2009 at 4:44 am
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February 7th, 2009 at 4:46 am
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