HCL product documentation is Open Source

This is not strictly news, though at Engage HCL announced that the product documentation is now Open Source (and many other things, see this presentation)

anyone who used the official documentation for e.g. Sametime has noticed that is on GitHub.

This is great news from various points of view: it confirms the commitment HCL has for Open Source, see the above presentation (and as a Director of OpenNTF this is great for us), and for the first time gives us users the possibility of improving the documentation.

Now, I know that if you are an Admin you may think “not for me, GitHub and the like are developer stuff”, but this is not true. I am an Admin and I made some changes to the Sametime 12.0.2 official documentation! 🙂

First of all you may want to get familiar a bit with GitHub if you aren’t already. The presentation from the OpenNTF webinar we did on that topic will help you https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/august-openntf-webinar-git-and-github-explained/250012401

What I did.
I opened the repository of the documentation here https://github.com/HCL-TECH-SOFTWARE/sametime-doc and made a fork (basically is a copy that I can edit)

Then I switched to my fork here https://github.com/rboccadoro/sametime-doc and changed the documents that contained some small errors.

Now, the two copies are different, mine contains the corrections and the HCL one doesn’t. What do you do to have the changes posted in the official repository? Just click on the link in the homepage of your fork, here

This will bring you back to the HCL GitHub repo and you can click here

You will see this

Now fill in the form and submit it.

HCL documentation team (the owner of the repository) will review the changes you propose and if they accept them, they will become part of the official documentation

If you open the HCL repository and click on “Pull requests” you can see that I submitted two and they have been accepted, which means that HCL is really listening to suggestions.

Good job HCL!