Big Blue sees Red -- Celebrating 40 years of IBM international technical support

Tony Austin
Thursday, 25 September 2008 13:58

Opinion and Analysis

Probably the most well-known and appreciated deliverable of the ITSO is the wide range of IBM Redbooks that they produce.

Redbooks -- or the slimmer volumes called Redpapers, and the one-page documents called Technotes -- are freely downloadable PDF or HTML documents usually developed during a residency and published some weeks later.

They got this name simply because originally they had plain red covers. Today  they have a niftier appearance, such as the one shown here (which, being a show-off, is one I contributed to in 2003, the previous one being a mere 20 years before that).

They are distinguished, in their intent and content, from IBM product documentation (sometimes referred to as "Whitebooks" since they don't have the famous red cover), which contain the regular sort of product usage and reference material.

In distinction, Redbooks usually cover peripheral background information, tips and techniques, lessons learnt when installing and using products, comparisons with similar or alternative products, best practices, and similar guidance that sometimes was discovered too late (e.g., late-breaking hardware or software changes) to be incorporated into the product's regular documentation.

They cover a vast range of topics related to IBM products, services, and architectures. They are usually specific to a particular hardware and/or software product (for example, Implementing IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager V7.1 Service Catalog or High Availability, Scalability, and Disaster Recovery for DB2 on Linux, UNIX, and Windows).

However some Redbooks are much broader in content and thereby of more interest to general readers, even those with no IBM products installed. Here I'm referring to Redbook titles such as TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview or Understanding LDAP - Design and Implementation or Introduction to Networking Technologies or Understanding Optical Communications or Implementing Technology to Support SOA Governance and Management or Case Study: Information as a Service SOA Scenario or a whole series on patterns like: Patterns: Implementing an SOA using an Enterprise Service Bus

You get the point, I'm sure. This corpus of IBM publications is a real treasure trove of free information for IT professionals and enthusiasts.

In future iTWire articles, I'll have more to say about IBM Redbooks. Further, I plan to extend that coverage to  IT documentation from other sources that's freely available (and usually free) on the Web.

In the meantime, congratulations to IBM for starting up the ITSO forty years ago and for committing to its future.

See The ITSO celebrates its 'Ruby Anniversary' for more information.