Development and Pipeline - Group home

Oops! Yes, we still want your product feedback!

  

“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.” This quote by Tom Peters resonates with me when I think about all the feedback that we receive on the IBM Z DevOps products, especially IBM Developer for z/OS (IDz). A big THANK YOU to all the users that have provided feedback by responding to surveys! These survey requests appear within the products, after closing support tickets or as email requests. We value ALL comments. Patting ourselves on the back when we receive the ones that make us smile from ear-to-ear like, ‘IDz is extremely intuitive and enhances my development experience. It creates a highly productive environment for me and many other application teams.’ or ‘… IBM Developer for z/OS is very good for someone to make the paradigm shift from developing on an emulator to developing on a more contemporary tool. And the extensibility on IDz is an icing on the cake.”

But more importantly, we learn so much when we receive constructive comments on areas of frustration or ways we can improve. This, I believe is a testament to our success. We listen to our customers and try our best to implement suggestions to provide functions that you need to get your job done. That’s why we apologize if you see this when you try to give us product feedback.

We are transitioning our survey mechanism; so, it may take some time for the new tooling to be available. However, we do not want that to prevent anyone from giving comments. Please do consider one of these methods to give us your feedback - 

  1. Ideas portal - these used to be called Request for Enhancements (RFEs).

  2. Start a discussion in right panel of the Dev & Pipeline Community - you do have to join and be a member to do this, which also gives you access to more resources in the library.

  3. Send me an email anytime - joys@us.ibm.com - again I appreciate all comments.

As we close out 2023, I wish everyone a safe holiday. Remember us in your holiday giving, your feedback is the perfect gift!

Comments

Theresa Ramsey
Thu December 14, 2023 07:28 PM

As Joy said, we really appreciate feedback on our products! We read every comment, idea and discussion thread. The more specific you are with your feedback, the better we can take action on making improvements. 
If you have tried to provide feedback via the IDz popup, we thank you for your patience as we change the underlying survey mechanism. Please use any of the methods described to reach out to IBM. We're listening. 

Susan Mazzara
Tue December 12, 2023 05:19 PM

Hi @bill vic,

I have a few answers and a follow-up question for you.

First the answers:

  • The prompt to load the latest version can be responded to two ways: You can click the "View latest" link to load the latest version of the documentation (version 3.1.0 in the case of z/OS), or you can use the "Change version" menu to choose the version you want. I've created a 13-second demo that illustrates these options: Newer Version Prompt.gif.
  • There are several ways to filter search results: by document type (for example IBM Documentation or Support Technotes), product and version, documentation section, or all IBM Documentation. You can also expand a search to include all of ibm.com or control the number of search results on a page. These are illustrated in this demo: Filter Search Results.gif.
  • Finally, you can download an offline version of the documentation directly from the IBM Documentation site. Some products, like IBM Developer for z/OS, provide a .zip file that you can load into the IBM Documentation Offline app. Others, especially those that are very large like IBM z/OS, provide a PDX file. Both of these types of offline documentation are available for download from the IBM Documentation table of contents. These are illustrated in this demo: Offline Documentation Downloads.gif.

My follow-up question is: Can you please tell me which documentation you searched and what the search string was? I'd like to try to reproduce the behavior you saw and follow up with you or report it to IBM Documentation for further investigation.

Thank you!

Susan Mazzara

Information Developer, IBM Developer for z/OS

bill vic
Thu December 07, 2023 06:02 PM

I just did a search, it told me there were 172 hits. 1-10 were not what I wanted so i clicked on 2 for the next page. it remembered my search criteria but told me there were zero matches

bill vic
Thu December 07, 2023 05:52 PM

I have a couple of suggestions . When I go look at documentation for zos 2.4 and you tell me there is newer documentation available do not take me to a 3.1 document. take me to the newest 2.4 doc. the 3.1 doc probably includes a whole bunch of stuff that is not relevant or true for 2.4.     I used to be able to begin using an online web document. If I realized what I was seeing was not what I wanted I could search the document for a keyword and go to that portion of the document. Now if I try to do a search I get a search of the whole IBM world or at least a whole bunch of other docs. My alternative to do something that actually works is stop, download the doc. save it in a file. close the page I am at, open the doc as a pdf and then search within the doc. This used to be a simple process of just searching the doc. This is the kind of process I expect from an alternate platform person, not an MVS person.