Wednesday, March 31, 2010

But do you get manuals with it?

I should know this answer but since I've accessed all of my learning and research on-line for the last few years so I don't know the answer. Does the following Domino media pack contain printed manuals? It costs c.$170 so I suspect it does... but I'd like to be sure.

IBM LOTUS NOTES AND DOMINO FOR MULTIPLATFORMS VERSION 8.5 ENGLISH DVD 128 BIT ENCRYPTION MEDIA PACK Vendor stock code: AH0ZDEN

The customer is upgrading from R5 so they have a bit of a learning curve...
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6 comments:

Brownie said...

I don't think it does Graham. I suspect when they say Media pack it may just be the DVD's for install. I don't think IBM has printed manuals for a few years now. Probably best to confirm with the disti.

Graham Dodge said...

the disti doesn't know and he says IBM doesn't know (but they are checking further up the food chain). Since the media pack costs c.$170 I hope it does have manuals & if it doesn't then I'll just put the stuff on a USB and send it to them (after they pay for the licenses).

Eric Mack said...

As @Brownie said, the media packs are just that -- at least in my experience. They used to have a separate documentation pack. No idea if it still exists.

Aurora Vanderbosch said...

To the best of my knowledge (and I've done exhaustive web searches and contacted the IBM publishing folks about every six months or so, in the last few years), the last set of "Yellow Books" (the Lotus Notes System Administrator manuals and the Developer manuals) was for Notes 6...and they haven't made any since.

If you do enough searching, you'll eventually find a place where it LOOKS like you can download a PDF version of the manuals, and print them yourself--but it turns out that what you download are the usual nsf files.

The manuals are, however, nothing more than the printed version of the "help" databases that are available with the installation...so the online help is exhaustive and very, well, helpful. (If you like online help. I don't. Hence the forlorn hope that eventually I'll be able to buy another set of the books, in a later version. ;))

You may be able to track down a version of the Dom 6 Yellow Books, though, on eBay, or online...I still use mine everyday, even though I'm administering a Domino 8.5 environment--much of the info is still good.

The Administrator manuals were always: "Administering the Domino System" and the part number for the 6 version is: CT1L6NA. The cost was usually around $100 for the Admin docpack.

(For that matter, I still use my Domino 5 Developer pack, as well--I never got around to buying a new copy of that. :))

Hope that helps save someone else a few headaches! :)

Graham Dodge said...

Thanks Aurora. Now the question I need to answer is, if the media pack contains only CDs then why does it cost the customer c.$170 (+ shipping)? I could understand $20 or $30 but where's the value in $170?

Gavin Bollard said...

What's a manual? I haven't seen one of those for years.

The $170 is to pay for IBM to put it on CD. They can't just write out an English Windows version because their download site is so confusing that the techs end up downloading everything (about 8GB worth) and burn it all to CD for you.

You end up with every operating system and every language. Sure, you can only use a couple but the coasters make great talking points at parties.