New Site Information

Yes - the CiscoUnityTools.com (a.k.a. AnswerMonkey.net and LindborgLabs.com), is getting a new look for a number of reasons.  But don't panic.  All the same information is still here and your links to the old URLs will continue to work fine through the magic of 301 redirects.  The tools pages you see will, over time, end up being one of the new ones out here instead of the old familiar ones you may be expecting.  Once all the pages have been moved I'll flip the switch and the domains will point to this site directly.  The old URL redirects will remain active indefinitely since I know a lot of sites have saved links to specific tools pages that they would not be happy about breaking.

Aesthetics are not the primary issue here, although the new trimmed down and sleeker design is nice.  The entire site structure is being overhauled top to bottom since it was becoming a real chore to maintain all the functions the site is used for.  Beyond tools storage (100+ of them) it also acts as a search engine repository, document redirector, houses beta AJAX applications for other business units and a number of other "on the side" functions.  The folder structure I put in place around 1997 did not account for the size and varied uses it'd be expected to handle.  I've put off this overhaul just about as long as I could but with the impending releases of Unity 8.0 and Connection 8.0 and the corresponding tools segmentation that would come with it, the site was about ready to collapse (as was it's administrator).

The primary difference on the new site is the consolidated downloads page which you can visit clicking on the "All Downloads" link in the navigation bar above.  The grid is built with all client side java script and PHP so any browser should be able to manage it and most security conscious sites should be ok with it (I hope).  This approach allows users to find the types of tools, training and documentation they want quickly and easily and only one page needs to be maintained (actually, one big XML file with all the download info in it). 

You'll also see some new search options show up out here using the custom Google searching tools which we've been testing with lately.  So far these search tools has been very well received by end users and internal Cisco engineers as well.

Finally the site is designed and built such that it can be maintained by a largely automated process.  The overhead of the old site was beginning to take up more time than I could spare.  This means that when the work is done it'll be possible to simply update a single database table with a tool's new version information, press a button and the XML for the download grid, the site updates log,  the tool's home page and the RSS feed will all be auto generated and pushed via FTP to the site.  Ongoing maintenance will be a snap and incorrect information in one place or another or "missed" items should be a thing of the past.  It'll also do in minutes what takes me about half an hour per tool today. 

So short version this is all good people.  Feedback on the sites layout and design are always welcome, of course.  As ever I prefer folks do this through the Unity Forum if possible.