Technote Search Readme (tips, techniques, and links)

• all IBM Cognos knowledge base documents are now Technotes
• you can access the knowledge base by searching for Technotes from any page on ibm.com
• every product family has its own support page, and a Technote search from a particular product page returns only documents related to that product
• each product also has an advanced search page which allows component level searches, or you can filter by component via the Product category dropdown on the search results page
• every product page has links to documentation, proven practices, forums, etc. Just bookmark the key pages relevant to your work to easily access all the product related knowledge.
  

You can search the knowledge base from anywhere on ibm.com. As indicated above, the page you are on acts as the product filter. That means you have three choices:

• search from the top masthead that appears on any IBM webpage (beware: this searches across all of IBM and is not recommended)
• search from the main Cognos support page (this searches all Cognos products)
• search from a particular product page (this returns only the documents associated with that product)

On the other hand, if you did a search on PDF chart report from the masthead, you'll get over 4000 results returned from many different IBM products. Try again with slow performance and you'll get nearly 34,000 hits.

As you can see, in most scenarios it is highly recommended to search from either the main Cognos support page or the key product page in question.

As noted above, this is usually the result of searching on something 'general' from the masthead. Or you may have navigated away from the Cognos product pages and done a search from an unrelated page. A search from a specific Cognos product page can only return documents that have a hard-coded document level association with that product.

It is important to keep in mind that every word that you enter within the search box must appear in a document for it to be returned (unless you use the advanced search 'any words' option, or include the OR operator between search terms). Therefore, a search query may be too detailed. In such a case, try simplifying the query by removing some words.

The next most common reason for finding nothing when searching is that you are searching from the wrong product page or have selected the wrong component if using the advanced search. Make sure you're on the right page, and try repeating the search from the main Cognos support page (ibm.com/cognos/support)

To find the main Cognos support page, simply navigate to ibm.com/cognos/support (bookmark this page). From there, you can get to a particular product page by selecting from the dropdown list at the top of the page, as seen below:

There are two ways you can search at the component level:

1. Start from the advanced search page for a particular product and select one or more components that you want to focus your search on.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Alternatively, search from the main product page, then select a particular component from the Product category dropdown on the search results page (Note: This product categorization is handled differently between the various product segments at IBM which requires that you reselect the main product one more time before its components are populated in this dropdown list)
   
   

1. Search Scope. Make sure you search from the appropriate product support page since the page itself acts as the filter for all the Technotes returned by the search. For example, if you do a search from the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence support page, you will only get back Technotes that have Cognos 8 Business Intelligence as a hard-coded product association.


2. Component Level Search. Use the Advanced Search to do a component level search within each of the IBM Cognos product families (refer to the links below within the Related Information section). Rather than search against all the components that make up the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence product, you can select only Data Manager, for example, if that is the focus of your search.

Some of the benefits of this advanced search include:

• multi-select listbox with every component (based on the product page you search from)
• words to exclude
• date range (last 3 months, last 6 months, etc.)
• language filter
• APAR filter
• ability to set the number of results returned per page

You can also do a regular search from the main product page, then filter the search results by a particular component if you click on the Product category dropdown then click the search icon again (you may need to do this twice if the document is associated to more than one product family).


3. Use quotation marks around compound words or error messages to make sure they are treated as a single term. For example, searching on Data Manager tables from the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence support page returns 289 Technotes that contain the words "data", "manager", and "tables" in any order or context. On the other hand, searching on "Data Manager" tables will bring back a far more focused set of 116 results that refer to the product "Data Manager" and include the word "tables" as well. This is one of the most important tips to keep in mind.


4. Use the OR logical operator to search alternative words or expressions, such as the query performance "out of memory" OR "insufficient memory" OR outofmemory OR "lack of memory" which will return any document that contains the word performance and one of the expressions linked by the OR operator.


5. Be aware that the reserved logical operands AND, OR, and NOT (in either upper or lower case) will be interpreted by the search engine as such unless they have double quotation marks around them. This is a common issue for search engines and is usually only a problem when searching on exact wording within error messages, etc. In such cases, putting the entire phrase in quotes is highly recommended even if these reserved words do not appear.


6. Use wildcards (*) to expand on the range of words to be returned within search results

Note: Wildcards cannot be used within multiple words surrounded by "double quotation marks" since they are used to perform an exact match search (which the wildcard contradicts)


7. Limit search results by using either the Exclude words field on the advanced search page, or by putting a minus sign (-) immediately in front of any words to be excluded. For example, the following search syntax would return any documents that have the exact term "content store" appearing within, include any words that begin with instal... and do not contain the word Oracle:

"content store" instal* -Oracle

Alternatively, use the (+) sign immediately in front of a search term to require that the word appear in any documents returned. For example, the following search syntax would return any documents that have the exact term "content store" appearing within, include any words that begin with instal... and contain a reference to DB2

"content store" instal* +DB2


8. Search within results to narrow the scope of the search. This can be done by specifying additional words on the search results page, by selecting one of the Products listed in the Product category dropdown, by selecting a Document Type, or a combination of any or all of the above.


9. Translate. Most Technotes are written in English, but there are links on the right side of every Technote page that provides machine translation into 9 major languages.


10. Bookmark the pages you will frequently use, such as the support page for any particular Cognos products, the Advanced Search page for each product, Documentation Information Centers, Proven Practices, etc. You can even save search result pages, from which you can add additional search terms later on.

1. knowledge base search which only retrieves results that are related to that particular product
2. advanced knowledge base search
3. online product documentation organized into Information Centers
4. Cognos forums and communities
5. product downloads
6. Cognos Customer Center
7. Cognos Proven Practices
8. Supportlink
9. Software Environments page
10. the latest news
11. product advisories
12. diagnostic tools
13. course search and registration
    
14. IBM Service Request tool (to open and manage your PMRs)