In 1998 Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a short article titled „Cool URIs don’t change” in which he describes why URIs (URLs) should not change or at least redirect gracefully. A great paper that ist still valid today.

Well, it seems that IBM employees never heard of that article. Since I know IBMs Website from their beginnings in the 90ties of the last century, the URIs kept changing. Even links to important marketing events, etc. were not kept up to date.

What really ticked me of today was IBMs link to the IBM Lotus Notes Calendaring & Scheduling Schema I wrote about in February of 2006. If you click on the URL I provided in the blog-entry, you will get this entry:

This page will automatically redirect you to the Web page you requested. Otherwise, go to this URL

„this URL” is not a link, there is no other link mentioned and the automatic redirection will point you to the generic „developerWorks > Lotus > Technical library > Lotus documentation page” which has NO link to the Notes Calendaring & Scheduling Schema. Even if you are desperate and try the search feature of this page, you won’t find the Calendaring & Scheduling Schema.

But the PDF is still there! If you search Google for „Notes Calendaring & Scheduling Schema”, the 4^th link will get you directly to the PDF-Document „Notes Calendaring & Scheduling Schema”.

So where ist it? You have to look at „developerWorks > Lotus > Documentation > Lotus Notes documentation” where, among other Product documentation, white papers and Redbooks you will also find the „IBM Lotus Notes Calendaring & Scheduling Schema” again. Hurray!

Dear IBM management: PLEASE employ someone to manage all redirects, etc. PLEASE! This gets really annoying.

Tagged as: documentation, ibm, links, notes, Notes+Domino, rant, redirects, Wissen_ist_Macht | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Freitag, 20070504, 09:02 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)