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Can you spare a few minutes for some feedback on VMware Documentation?

04.10.2017 by William Lam // 2 Comments

I am always looking for ways in which we can improve our products and documentation should be no different. In fact, documentation should be treated just as important as the product feature itself. I am very interested in your thoughts and comments and this will also help with a project I am doing internally at an upcoming R&D offsite.

With that, I had recently published a very short 8-question survey on Social media asking for feedback regarding VMware Documentation which you can access in the URL below:

https://goo.gl/forms/cLaUhTMRAeZGpLxz1

If you have any feedback, good or bad, please take a few minutes to fill it out. We can only improve or continue to do what we are doing if we get feedback from our customers.

Several of you mentioned you were interested in the results and to be transparent, I am sharing the current results that are non-free form text (that gets a bit tricky for obvious reasons). As of writing this article, there have been a total of 118 responses submitted and the preliminary results can be seen below. Does this match up to your experiences of using VMware documentation? If not, please consider providing your feedback. Also, feel free to forward this survey to others as well and thank you for your time and support.

1. Where do you normally go to find information about VMware products (e.g. how to, configuration, etc)? [multiple choice selection]


2. Are you normally able to find what you are looking for when using VMware documentation?


3. Please rate VMware documentation on the level of technical details provided [1 - Not Enough, 5 - Exactly Right]


7. Do you find it easy to provide feedback on VMware documentation?


8. If VMware documentation was collaborative, would you consider contributing content back (e.g. enhancements, typos, etc)?

Categories // Feedback Tags // documentation, feedback

Quick Tip - Offline viewing of vSphere API & other API docs using Dash

06.06.2014 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

As a frequent consumer of the vSphere API, a must have bookmark for all my systems (work/personal) is the vSphere API Reference document. In my opinion, This is a must have for anyone that is serious about vSphere Automation and having it be an online document, it allows you to quickly search for a specific property or method. The problem with an online document of course is that if you are not connected to the internet, you will not have access to it. VMware does provides an offline version for viewing which is bundled within the vSphere Management SDK.

This morning when I woke up, I was going through the list of sites that I read on a regular basis such as Y Hacker News and the top entry at the moment was "Dash - Beautiful instance offline docs for almost everything". I quickly realized this was not the first time I had heard of this tool, my good friend Timo Sugliani had actually introduced me to Dash a couple months back and he even mentioned it might be possible to view the vSphere API documents. After installing Dash, I did not see the vSphere API docs from what I recall and I just never had time to play with it again. I figure it has been awhile, maybe I should give it another try? I updated Dash this morning to latest version and noticed that the vSphere API documentation is now available and covers vSphere 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5.

dash-documentation-1
Once you have downloaded the specific vSphere API documentation, you can then quickly browse or search through the different class objects, methods, properties and enumeration values. You can see from the screenshot below, it will automatically search through all your documentation include online searches on such as Google and Stack Overflow which I thought was pretty neat.

dash-documentation-2
In addition to being able to easily view the vSphere API documentation offline, but you can also view other types of API documentation. Dash currently supports over 290+ documentation sets and you can even create your own doc sets and contribute them back to Dash. The other neat thing about Dash which I have not tried yet is the plugin integration with popular IDEs like Sublime, Textmate, Eclipse to just name a few. The only downside I see at the moment is that Dash is only for Mac OSX, but it looks like there might be plans to support a Windows version later this year. If you work with a lot of API documentation, Dash might be something you may want to check out. I know I will start leveraging it when I am offline.

Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // dash, documentation, vSphere, vSphere API

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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