Help components

Help components include a locally-installable version of IBM® Knowledge Center and help packages that contain content plugins for product versions. You can download a locally-installable version of IBM Knowledge Center to deploy help packages in your local environment.

IBM Knowledge Center
A standalone help system that includes a WebSphere® Application Server Liberty, version 8.5.5.x, embedded server. IBM Knowledge Center is distributed to Maximo® customers on https://www-933.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/. IBM Knowledge Center is available for Windows, Linux, or AIX platforms and you can run IBM Knowledge Center on a local computer, server, or read-only media.

After you extract the IBM Knowledge Center package, you add product help packages to it to deploy help in your local environment. You can use IBM Knowledge Center to host help packages for several products at the same time, if the products are on compatible release versions. If you want to host help packages that are not compatible with one another, you can run additional instances of IBM Knowledge Center that you configure to run on different ports.

Help packages
Contain the same documentation that is available on http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter and include one or more content plugins that contain topics in their appropriate directories and the navigation files that control the table of contents for the topics. Help packages also include the following files that are required by IBM Knowledge Center:
  • A taxonomy.properties file contains the taxonomy value for the product version and the path to the main toc.ditamap file for the plugin or plugins in the help package.
  • The KC_taxonomy.ditamap file lists the taxonomy values for all products in the IBM software catalog. A basic version of this file is included in IBM Knowledge Center but this version of the file is not up-to-date. The KC_taxonomy.ditamap file that is included in the help package is the current version of the file when the help package is created.

Help packages include instructions for where to add the plugins and the additional files to IBM Knowledge Center.

IBM Knowledge Center versions
The locally-installable versions of IBM Knowledge Center are based on IBM Knowledge Center, version 1.5. This version has a different look and feel to IBM Knowledge Center, version 2.0, which is on http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter. The functionality is similar but there are some differences in navigation and search. PDF creation is not supported on the locally-installable version.

When a locally-installable IBM Knowledge Center, version 2.0, is available, it will be distributed to customers who want to update their local version.