IBM Information Management System (IMS) - Group home

Farewell to the IMS DevCenter

  

The IMS Developer Center has been a long-standing platform for all things related to IMS. From the Gold program, to Makerspace, and even the annual IMS Internship -- the DevCenter has always been the go-to place for both newcomers and experienced IMSers.

Over the past several years, however, IMS has undertaken an in-depth journey to understand how exactly our customers learn about IMS. In addition, a recent surge of interest in IMS resources, content, and educational materials has helped us understand a foundational truth – the quality of our IMS content channels must evolve alongside IBM's portfolio of offerings. IBM has heard this call for improvement in earnest, as we have committed to improving how everyone reaches our content.


What has changed?

One of the greatest issues our customers face when trying to find the information they need is not knowing where to find it. As part of a larger ongoing initiative, IBM has re-imagined the experience for the communities of all IBM products. Under the new 'IBM Community' platform, all IBM products will share a consistent experience that maximizes ease of use while providing the most diverse set of content possible.

What does this mean for IMS? The IMS Developer Center is now rebranding as IMS Community, a homepage for all IMS-related activities. Here, you can find any IMS content relating to recent events, blog posts, IMS activities, and more. This new platform will serve as a basis for future community features to facilitate a unique ecosystem of IMS content.

Preview of the IMS Community

Preview of the IMS Community




What about everything else that was part of the Developer Center?

The advent of IBM Communities means that our existing content channels demand improvement. However, to maintain the current experience that IMS has offered, we have moved our program and strategic content to an area we find fit for such engagement – our imsdev GitHub Pages site. Using this site as part of our IMS content portfolio allows us to maintain and experiment with our IMS offerings in the same DevCenter style you are familiar with, while we continue to re-assess our content presentation standards.

Over time, our IMS Community site will be updated to incorporate some of this content once again. Until then, these pages will continue to be hosted the imsdev GitHub Pages site. Here, you can find Java resources for IMS Developers like the IMS GitHub repo offerings, IMS DevOps & Java strategy, as well as our IMS-specific programs such as Makerspace and Gold. The imsdev site is part of our growing collection of comprehensive developer resources and will see continued improvement in the future.

Preview of the imsdev GitHub Pages site

Preview of the imsdev IMS GitHub Pages site




So, what will change in the future for these two platforms?

For our imsdev GitHub site, we expect to see more rapid improvements over the coming months. We hope to initially expand our offerings here in two key areas, those being coding resources and educational materials. For our IMS Community, we will see that this platform continues to mature by providing more engaging content, more easily consumable content, and experimenting with new content mediums.