Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The One-Site Project

It's my great pleasure to announce our new web-site. The one-site project aimed to unified our two web sites. As previously mentioned, we started this project sometime ago to address the needs of our community. We believe that the diverse interests of our community are better represented by the cloud IT roles. And the new website has been designed to help our users to navigate following the interests, languages, and preferred communication channel of each role.

Navigation by Cloud IT Roles

First let me mentioned how the generic navigation of the site has been greatly improved. The main navigation is Learn, Eucalyptus Cloud, Participate, Services and Partners, and, if you already know where you want to go, in the footer of each page you will find direct links to subsections. The progression is obvious, starting from generic documents on cloud computing, on premise cloud, IT roles going to the specific of Eucalyptus Cloud, finally exposing how to reach our community, Services provided and last but not least diving into the rich and varied partner ecosystem.


Information customized on a per-role basis


Let's go back to the navigation by roles. In the Learn section there is a selection that allows each roles to explore what cloud means for them. Each role page has specific links and information related to the respective competences. Let me give you examples for some of the roles represented there:
  • Cloud Administrators will find install and maintenance guides. In case they get into issues they can search our knowledge base for the specific error code, or engage other administrators to discuss about the different installation options or what is the best hypervisor for their situation; 
  •  Developers can quickly reach the latest source code, looks at currently worked on issues, and start talking about the latest patch they have been working on. Detailed informations on Eucalyptus internal structure and API supported are also the bread and butter for Developers;
  • Application Architects will find everything about our starter images, from what's inside and why, to how to recreate and modify them. They would want to use and modify the instances recipes and share their latest scripts to recreate their production environment. 
You will find the roles highlighted throughout the web site, so, for example, under GetEucalyptus you will find options for Managers (get the free trial), Architects (FastStart for a quick proof of concept), Administrators (get the latest release), Application Architect (get the starter images).

Find how to participate independently from your role

Participate and Resource Library are the two notable exceptions to the roles principle. While you will still find links to the cloud roles pages, these pages addresses our community as a single entity. Participate gathers selected blogs posts for all our users, as well as giving pointers to where to find online community. Resource Library allows you to find all the published information about Eucalyptus and cloud computing organized by type and date.

With the new web site, you will also find new redesigned forum. You will find the motivation behind it in Darren's blog, and more about its functioning in the Engage blog. Our new site is now available and ready to Engage you: let us know what you like and how we can improve it for you.

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