Improvements you'd like to see in Novell's Knowledgebase

[KBOYLE]

Providing better access to information...

The current Knowledgebase does a pretty good job of consolidating technical documents but what I would really like to see is a single location where I can access a wide range of Novell documents and very quickly zero in on the relevant ones.

There are still too many places to search when problem solving or trying to remember where I may have previously encountered a particular document. If I need a specific TID and have the number, it's easy to find it (most of the time). If my interest is a bit more general, I may have a large number of documents to sift through. For some things I may even have to visit a different site.

The knowledgebase, in a broader sense, can be taken to mean any information pertaining to Novell, its products & services, its partners, press releases, licensing, training, events, technical documents, forum posts, NUI, Brainshare, patches, downloads, etc. I think it should be wide-ranging in scope - almost like a general purpose search engine. The trick would be to provide a rich set of selection criteria to limit the results.

In addition to the standard keyword search, date range (created/changed), Author, etc. a broad selection of categories would allow the search to be refined to the point where a relatively few meaningful results are returned. Some examples might be:

Product Group / product / release
Location: Region / Country / City
File Format: HTML, PDF, PowerPoint, video, audio, iso, executable, ...
Target audience: Sr. Mgmt., Middle Mgmt., Admin, General, ...
Document Type: TID, CoolSolution, product read-me's, Connections article, white paper, forum post, product announcement, presentation
Subject matter: technical, marketing, sales, training, events, partners, security, patches,

I would expect this list to be enhanced and refined over time to make it more useful.

Of course, we often don't know exactly what we're looking for so I'd like see a breakdown of the results (i.e. number of documents satisfying the various criteria) and the ability to include/exclude certain criteria to refine my selection.

Once my search criteria has been refined to the point where it provides the desired results, I would like to be able to save it. I find often myself searching for the same things over and over again.

Once the search has been saved, it would be very convenient if I could be notified by email whenever any new items appeared that satisfied my search criteria. For example:
- What new TID's or Patches are available for these products?
- What training or other events will be coming to my city during the next 30 days?
- Have any of these documents been updated since I last checked?

I'm sure, given a little time, I could come up with more...:) I hope this helps!

Kevin