Another year of discovery.bmc.com

  by Adrian Long | 05 Oct 2011 | Permalink | Web & Community

Nearly a year after my previous post about the state of the BMC Atrium Discovery web presence, I thought it was about time I put together a bit of information about what’s been happening here in the past few months.
The more observant of you may have noticed a few changes around here lately. First, the site’s had a bit more of a visual refresh, bringing us closer to the rest of the BMC web presence. Second, the “Configipedia” area has been tidied up and a lot of the more dated content has gone the way of the dodo.

The latter of those is still an ongoing process, and we’d like to apologise for any links you might find that lead to restricted pages – those will be either fixed or tidied away in the very near future. We’ve got a lot of content that’s been moved to a locked-down “holding pen” whilst we determine where it needs to go and what patching up is needed. If the pages only need a lick of paint and a bit of a polish then they’ll be back shortly. If they’re beyond saving then we’ll patch up the holes they’ve left.

You should expect to see more changes to discovery.bmc.com in the coming months as we focus in on ways of getting our web content and community tools to be as useful and intuitive as possible. We’re also continually looking into ways to get them to work with other tools within BMC so you don’t have to waste time checking around different places quite so often.

Last time I posted, I mentioned our “Migration Masterplan”. As you might expect, that’s undergone a few revisions in the past year as the landscape has changed around us. But we’ve not been standing still. Our approach to documentation is starting to spread within BMC, and Vitaly Burlai (discovery.bmc.com’s fearless developer) is heavily involved in that process. Some other BMC products are now producing their documentation on the Confluence platform, and we plan to eventually bring our own product documentation into that. Our approach to community is also gaining some traction, although that’s a slower process… After all, a community is a group of people, not a piece of software. It takes a bit more time… you can’t just upgrade to a new version!

In line with what I said in my previous post, our focus is on doing the right things and working with our community. We plan to keep moving forward, rather than just migrating to existing platforms.