Client Management Suite

As of I do not know when, our Altiris Knowledgebase has been moved to SymWISE.
If you go to kb.altiris as a partner, you can still enter the knowledgebase, but a lot of articles you will get a link to the SymWISE article.
Seams "only" the [Feature Requests] did survice this moving...

Al fine together.  I can undertstand the move from Symc perspective.  But I tried to get acces all day :
All I get: "Internal Server Error - Read"

Anyone comment?

Site just sits and spins for me ... yay. There goes all the handy links I had acquired over the years too ....

"Internal Server Error "

Yeah, not working here either.  At one point I got it to load a "Login" page under the main Symantec banner (i.e. symantec.com), but no idea what account this would be for (SymAccount, old KB account, etc).  Now the old KB just gives 500 server errors also.  I'll escalate to my contacts to see what I can find out and get an ETA on resolution.  I REALLY hope they have some kind of redirector in place to "bounce" links from kb.altiris.com to the new site.

A redirector would be great. I bet I have over a hundred links built up over a period of  5 years. A redirector, even if temporary, would help save myself and I'm sure many others a bit of time and frustration.

I also have a large set of links that I assume will now not work unless there is some form of redirection (seems there will be, for a couple of months anyway, mentioned below).  It’s inconvenient being locked out of the KB entirely as well, I use the site a good few times a day at the moment.

Here was the announcement I received about this change, for those that haven’t see this yet:

Date: July 29, 2010
Notification Type: Change to notification service

In an effort to improve the quality of your Support experience, Symantec is implementing SymWISE, our new Enterprise Support knowledgebase, the first week of August, 2010. 

Because SymWISE contains a different Email Notification Subscription service, it is necessary for you to subscribe to the new Subscription service.  Note:   SymWISE also allows you to subscribe to Support Web sites via RSS feed, if your browser allows. 

Your current Subscription services at the following links will not carry over and will no longer work after SymWISE launches:  

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/news_bulletins/index.jsp

http://maillist.entsupport.symantec.com

Information in SymWISE is organized into Channels.  The new Subscription service allows you to subscribe to a Channel.  To list a few of these Channels:

•     Technical Solutions - Contains all Knowledge base (KB) articles created from cases
•     How To – Product specific How To articles
•     Best Practices – Product specific Best Practice articles
•     Alerts – Product specific articles about critical technical issues and how to mitigate or resolve these issues.
•     Known Issues – Product specific Known Issue articles
•     Downloads – Product specific downloads, hotfixes, and service packs

To subscribe to the new Email Notification Subscription Services, you will need to have a SymAccount.  To create a SymAccount, refer to the following article:  http://entsupport.symantec.com/docs/357940

Once you have a SymAccount, refer to the following article to set up and manage your Subscriptions:   http://entsupport.symantec.com/docs/357941

Note the following:
•     It will not be necessary to unsubscribe or remove your previous subscriptions.  The old system will be shut down and decommissioned after the SymWISE launch.
•     Articles that you have bookmarked will re-direct for a few months.   Please remember to add the new bookmark to replace the old bookmark.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience through this transition.

Thanks for the info. I never received any notification so the new site was a shock this morning. Good to know they already planned redirection. I suppose the site is just having launch day bugs although you'd expect that not to be the case for an enterprise support portal. It could be all the people who have relied on those links trying to hit the site all at once and it's getting overwhelmed. I know I used to visit it a couple of times a week.

no comment :-(

I didn't receive that notification either...strange.  The same info is posted on the SEER site, FWIW:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/358175.htm 

The site seems to be up and operational now. Redirection of the old links isn't working yet but I can pull up the site and navigate now.

not working either - some of the links go back to the old site which doesnt load -

Hmm, if you view the https://kb.altiris.com site it indicates that they are experiencing technical issues.  I'm not having much luck searching so far in SymWISE though; when I went here (seems to be the NS "landing page") and tried to search for "R13", I got a 404 error from kb.altiris.com/search.asp.  So things it would seem are not quite 100% just yet...

I've been told that the necessary resources are working on this issue and I've been added to an internal email list that will receive updates as they are available.  I will pass them along here as well.

Thanks for the update Andrew. We recieved this update. "The customer facing SymWISE solution has been reverted."

Let us know if you have anything to add.

If you need to search for KB articles, use this page:

http://clientui-kb.symantec.com/kb/index?page=home

Thanks for the updates Andrew and Cheryl!  Back to the ol' drawing board I think!

A very disapponting start to what was supposed to revolutionise the KB experience symantec-wide.  Pity.

I also did not receive any notification on this ..
But some 12 hours later all seems to work again..
All together, chapeau.  Eventhough the layout is somewhat different, it looks as if SymWISE is what is called progress...

One thing I found strange (also in kb.altiris):

If I search for "release notes sp4" with product "Deployment Solution".
One should expect the wanted article would be #1.
The first is on the release notes of ITM 7.0 MR1
Second on the release notes off DS but SP1
3rd on the release notes of Altiris ITM 7.0 MR1
the 4th is on Altiris DS 7.1 from Symantec Release Notes
The 5th is Deployment Solution for Dell Servers 3.2 MR1 Release Notes
and finaly... the 6th is what I requested for:
Altiris™ Deployment Solution 6.9 SP4 from Symantec Release Notes

But at the end, I found what i needed...

Andrew, could you please ask those dealing with this to put the old Altiris KB number in the migrated article somewhere as a footnote. I noticed yesterday that searching for the KB number worked well in bringing up articles that pointed to it..

Would make life much easier for those of us who have referenced the articles by number in customer documentation and for our (and your) customers.

I've submitted this request to the project owner - I'll let you know what I hear back.

I see kb.altiris.com is back up again.  Does anyone know whats happening? 

Personally I found the new site no better than the old and those initial performance issues were very inconvenient on Monday when I was troubleshooting a fairly critical issue.

The migration to SymWISE was rolled back, I believe.  The "legacy" Altiris KB site should be fully functional now.

Agreed that the search needs some work.  I don't expect it to be Google (or do I?), but when I search for "R13 memory leak" with a product of Notification Server, and I don't find article on the first page of results...that is a bit concerning.  Also the email article notification I got the other day (all 300KB of it!) has URLs with custom ports :3386 or something.  Dunno about anyone else, but I can't access those from my work computer; only HTTP/HTTPS on 80/443 is allowed by default.

Patience everyone, they'll get there eventually!

I hope they find a way to retain that.

I watch the Latest Articles section everyday.  I also browse KB articles by product on a pretty regular basis, just to see if there were documents written up that I find interesting or useful.

If you need to search the Altiris KB please use:  https://kb.altiris.com.  Since we are not live with SymWISE, http://clientui-kb.symantec.com/kb/index?page=home, is redirecting to a demo that does not include all content or functionality at this time. 

They're giving it another try but the new articles still don't contain the old number although the links in the articles haven't been changed yet.

So if all your documentation contains references to old Altiris KB numbers and you search for one you'll get the articles that refer to it but not the one you're actually looking for.

These type of links work now:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH43960 

Some advance notice would have been nice, I got an email notification last time, plus some articles I could access last week, I can’t find anymore.

Ugh... So is there a way to lookup Altiris KB articles just by number? I am not having any luck.

I can't believe this happened AGAIN.  What a pain!  Did nobody bother to ask us how we use the Altiris KnowledgeBase before building us a new one?

The ability to find answers to our problems is critical to our satisfaction with your product.  Making it harder to find answers means lower satisfaction and increased support calls.  I won't spend all day searching -- I'll just ask support to find it for me.

mclemson -->  you will spend all day on hold with static'y music.

<sigh> 

Then I can do things while I wait.

But yes, I've been on hold with support for hours for high-severity antivirus issues.  Stinks when you disconnect.  I've held high-level techs on the phone while I perform a 30-minute task because I can't stand to go through the queue again.

This is like Juice all over again. Take a great resource and make it less useful. Why not leave the redirect up, I don't understand why it is temporary. There are links all over the web to AKB articles.

I guess we can be thankful for 3rd party sites that don't do things like this.

Could the project manager for this change to stop by Connect and explain the reasoning behind this?  He or she may even hear from us on simple ways to appease us (like Brandon said, leaving up the AKB lookup tool forever).

For example: Wouldn't it be nice if you could search keywords on the SymWISE site and, rather than being forced to choose a product in the right, have the ability to choose a product family (Altiris)?

I've been in contact with the project manager in an effort to get the AKB redirects functioning.

Can't seem to get what i want....

 

:(

Thank you!

Could the URL be kb.symantec.com instead of the longer than life URL that it currently has.

None of the items in “Supported Products A to Z” work now on the new support page, not just the Altiris ones, you get this error:

I traded emails with one of the primary people actually doing the migration and he indicated to me that the AKB redirections "would not be going away any time soon", due to a variety of factors.

Cheryl: This was M.T. I emailed with (CC: to R.R.).

Kyle, I want your address book!

Kyle is a made man...

it is very painful to find a kb article in this knowledge base. is this the final solution ? one of the biggest advantage of altiris is gone.

Unfortunately, there is no way to look up an article by Altiris KB number.  If you have an article bookmarked, it should provide you with a redirector URL for the article in the new system. 

If you know the article title or some keywords from the article title, I would recommend utilizing search to find your articles in SymWISE.  If you are looking for an exact phrase, use quotation marks and you'll get better results. 

crisracker,

What are you trying to find?  The best way to find content in the new system is by SymWISE doc ID (which you probably don't have yet) or keyword search.  If you let me know what you are trying, I may be able to provide some assistance.

Thanks,

Stephanie

mclemson,

I like the suggestion for being able to search by product family vs. product!

What other painpoints are you having with the tool?  I understand that not being able to search by Altiris article number makes it more difficult to find the content that you're looking for.  Some things that may help you find what you're looking for:

• All AKB article pages have redirector URLs on them now.  If you had a AKB bookmarked you should be able to navigate to that page and find the new URL for the article you are looking for. 
• The URL also contains the new SymWISE DOCID.  You can use this ID to find the content on SymWISE by conducting a search for it.
• If you know an article title, conduct a search for the title.  I have had great success with this method.
• When conducting keyword searches, use quotation marks to find exact phrases.
• Utilize the filters on the right hand side to limit your results after conducting a search. 

Stephanie

Hi Vetsch,

Check out some of the tips I gave in response to some posts earlier in this string.  It may help you out!

Stephanie

Thanks Stephanie for the updates!

Cheryl

If you click on a link for another KB article from the one you are reading it fails and you get the same message about going to Syamantec's KB. I hope this is going to be fixed soon.

If you have access to https://kb-secure.altiris.com you can search for the article ID and it will return a link to SymWISE that actually display the correct article. 

If you search for the same article number on SymWISE you will get nothing.

This doesn't help the long list of saved links that I have but does provide a way to get the right articles.........

Hi Sean,

While we have redirectors in place for article pages, we could not redirect every link within articles to the new SymWISE pages.  The article authors are aware of this and will be working to update old links.  The best and fastest way to get this resolved is to send a comment in the article feedback asking the links to be updated.

Thanks,

Stephanie

That's pretty unforunate.  I didn't have these KBs bookmarked as we've just now encountered these issues.

Most of my Google searches return links in other Altiris forums. Ususally these posts simply linked to the KB number, or referenced it.  None of the links I've tried do anything but redirect to the "main" SymWISE page.

 

 

 

What we need is the old KB article numbers to be entered on the new Symwise articles as tags somewhere so that a search on Symwise for the old Altiris KB number will return the correct new article, not migrated ones still referring to the old Altiris KB article. We'll still be looking for old article numbers long after the old Altiris KB web pages are retired. Please do these things with users in mind.

But I believe it was also to simplify because enough "ref numbers" under Symantec areas !!! So I am pretty sure we will never get any.

So the tricks is to search the KB you know before into kb.altiris.com

Be care the good link is:  https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=49800,

Not at all: https://kb.altiris.com/display/1n/kb/article.asp?aid=49800

Because link is not valid -

try twice because, 1st try can get also redirect error, and works 2nd...

This can be a real problem, because a mass of existing & valid articles are giving a KBnumber & link as reference !!!! So If Symantec remove or deactivate the KB.ALTIRIS.COM redirections to the new TECH* or DOC* or HOWTO*, we will definitively loose a lot of valuable relations !!!!

Also: If the KB is a feature request, still only on the partner kb-secure.altiris.com, and I am afraid it will be more to fall out a dark hole... Instead of to be used. !!!

See also: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/kbaltiriscom-dead-now-place-change

A lot of customers won't have access to kb-secure and it will probably be retired long before the relevancy of the content. I usually leave customers with reports of what I have done that reference the Altiris KB number.

FYI on a few items (my apologies if I repeat any of the information already mentioned above):

 

Search by AKB Article ID

This is not currently possible but should be soon (hopefully within a few weeks or so). This is a design oversight caused by a misunderstanding of the way the software works on my part. When we designed the schema for our channels (templates), we included a Legacy ID field that contains the article number from the legacy system (so this information was migrated over). I incorrectly thought that making the Legacy ID field "internal only" would mean that articles could be found by legacy ID but that the information just wouldn't display when external users (customers, partners, etc.) view the article. It turns out that the security applied to a field affects not just visibility but also searchability.

I am currently testing the removal of the security assigned to the Legacy ID field to make it publicly visible and searchable. Once I have completed testing, this change will need to work its way through change control before it is eventually implemented in our Production environment. As I mentioned above, I am hoping that this will be in a few weeks or so, but please don't throw too many rotten tomatoes if it takes a little longer than that!

 

Subscriptions

While subscriptions were not migrated over from the other legacy systems, they were migrated over from the AKB. So, if you were subscribed to an article in the AKB, you should be subscribed to the corresponding migrated article in SymWISE. Category subscriptions work a little differently in SymWISE. You can't subscribe directly to a category; you have to subscribe to a category within a channel. So, if you were subscribed to a category in the AKB, you should be subscribed to the corresponding category (assuming it exists; the category structure in SymWISE is also a little different) in SymWISE in the Alerts, How To and Technical Solution channels.

To see and manage your subscriptions, simply log into the Support site with your SymAccount credentials and click on the Manage Subscriptions link in the My Support portlet on the right side. If you do not have a SymAccount, please register for a SymAccount using the same email address you used for your subscriptions. If after creating and logging into your SymAccount, you do not see any migrated subscriptions, please contact Support (hopefully, they can be linked to your SymAccount after the fact).

 

Latest Articles

While there is no longer a KB-wide "latest articles" feature (with the number of Symantec products and the volume of non-Altiris articles, this feature likely wouldn't be useful for users of Altiris products anyway), each product landing page has a Most Recent view (note that Most Popular is the default view). For example, click the following link to view the Most Recent articles by common topic for Notification Server: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=landing&key=55274&sort=recent.

 

Thanks,
  Martin Thuss

Yeah, as a support rep, you know I'm feeling the pain of the migration.  I feel it with about 50% of my calls.

HOWEVER.

There are already some distinct advantages, and as Martin and others work through the kinks in the system, you'll feel them too.

1) The search engine knocks the socks off of the older KB.  Trust me on this.  I use the KB every day, and have been here since the inception of the old one.  Even with all the bugs in this one, the search engine is MUCH more reliable.  Once it's fully up and we've made things as simple as possible, the advantage, I think, will be tremendous.

It's just that right now there are growing pains.  That's OK.  I lived through the last set of growing pains - I'm used to it now.

2) This one scales to all of Symantec.  What - would you prefer to searh 4 KB's depending on which product you use?

True, not all content is yet migrated as some have pointed out, but this is a BIG project.

True, we have some clean-up work to do.  The comment about the broken links is very real, and it's not going to be simple to fix, along with clearing bad KB's.  The good news on this is that we have a renewed focus on fixing both.

So, my 2 cents are that this is worth it, even though it hurts right now, and that if you'll be patient (wait - tech geeks and patience...  hmmm), we'll get there.  :D

Thomas,

I hear what you say and I even agree ;-)

But in my view (and I am guessing some are looking at it the same way) It is not I do not see the advantages.  All those you mention and more approvements are there looking at kb.altiris.  But I think it is more it is hard for me to understand a multi billion $ company can NOT understand the lack of migration, the lack of knowing, or even better, understanding how everybody has worked with kb.altiris numbers for the past xxx years.

Lacking that, makes the improvements a lot less impressive.  Getting those kb numbers in SymWise should have TOP-PRIORITY.  This view is hard for those working so dammed hard to and on SymWise.  Please do not take this personaly.  I, for myself, have big confidence SymWise in the end will get there and will become an invaluable tool also for the Altiris community.

Just wait and see what happens if that is done:  we will be officially cheer for this migration....

For whatever it's worth, I assure you, the team who did the migration feels your pain - more than you can guess.  They were the ones who built the first one for Altiris, and are now trying to expand into Symantec.  They were there at the very beginning of kb.altiris.com, and they are as frustrated as you are.  It's a bit of a catch-22, in that there are some things they CAN do, and other things they can not do.  Different company, different product, different limitations, different ways to work around the issues.

But it will come.  Again, it's the same team, and we're every bit as passionate about making it work.

And until then, yeah...  Ouch.

I hear you ...  You should not under estamate you value, ever ;-)

I can fully understand a team working that long and dedicated looking at these (new'ish) constraints knowing it will hit them instead of something else.   

It is a good cooperation thought between this team and us the end-users, in the end we should both get what we want.  Therefor it is not personal due to both want something done from the "greater" .  And as the "greater" always says it listens, to its end-users and what they want, the development team (in this case) will in the end also get what it wants/needs.  The circle of life hahaha.

It is a very good message you just send.  I hope a lot off people will read it and give their energy in helping: ask for the approvement!

Hi Martin, happy to read you work on giving us the AKB numbers live again into SYMwise.

It will be nice to have also the old "URL", but also the "not valid old URL", making them working directly, with a convert to a direct search extracted AKB number from previous old URL, to a search URL valid on SYMwise ! (Am I clear enough ? not sure my english! :)

Yes, we've heard and are actively working on your requests. Thanks for your active participation in this forum. Please see Martin's earlier post for how to list "most recent" articles. A fix for the legacy article ID search will be released with the next rollout of SymWISE.

Pascale,

My apologies; I'm not quite sure I understand. Can you please clarify using an example of the steps to take and the behavior you would like to see?

Thanks,
  Martin

Thx for this message!

Any view on the release date/period?

Here is a thought.  Are you looking for the ability to have the old URL (saved in favorites) automatically converted to a new search or even link in the new KB?  A redirect of sorts?

FYI, this particular change (making the legacy ID field publicly searchable/visible) does not require a code change (it is a configuration change) and therefore is not tied to a release. It still has to go through change control so it will be a few weeks or so for development, testing, user acceptance, red tape, etc.

Thanks,
  Martin

FYI, I have been having some issues accessing our Dev environment lately, impacting my ability to work on the "Search by AKB Article ID" and other changes. I have escalated the issue and am hoping to get back on Dev in the next few days so I can get back to this.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks in advance for your patience!

Martin

Hello, sorry not ma native language, I understand can be "strange" feeling.

Yes I mean, you can make the 2 URLs: (eg. for AKB 49800)

https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=49800&p=1,

https://kb.altiris.com/display/1n/kb/article.asp?aid=49800

you can make both directly working creating a redirection extracting the KB value from the original URL, and reidrecting to a new KB search using AKB number, like (don't know if the key will correctly be AKB, it is an exemple):

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&AKB=49800

So we should be able to access directly the good new SYMwise article, using the "old altiris url"...

That is the idea ! Is it not a good one ??

URLs following the format https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=ARTICLEID&p=PORTALID should redirect to the corresponding article in SymWISE (assuming the article in question was migrated to SymWISE).

URLs following the format https://kb.altiris.com/display/1[n]/kb/article.asp?aid=ARTICLEID are not fully-functional links to AKB articles (they don't work unless you've already established a session in the application, which you can't do now that the main portal link redirects to the Business Support site landing page).

For reference, only the three "entry point" URLs (https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp, https://kb.altiris.com/index.asp, https://kb.altiris.com/search.asp) redirect to specific corresponding pages in SymWISE, because these URLs do not require a session to be established. Any other URL will likely redirect you to index.asp (which is where you end up when trying to access a page that requires a session), which will in turn redirect you to the Business Support site landing page.

Thanks,
  Martin

We should be able to type KB article numbers into the search box and have the related how to come up. For example typing "50744" should link to this SymWISE article.

dfnkt_,

Please see the "Search by AKB Article ID" section in the comment I posted above: http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/altiris-knowledgebase-moved-symwise#comment-4577501

Thanks,
  Martin