Syndication is the process of promoting content external to VIOPS by creating a document that describes that external content and provides links to it.

Why syndicate content?

VIOPS is an expert aggregation point, where a community of experts shares their successful methods in breaking down barriers to deploy and manage VMware Infrastructure.

VIOPS is a community that tries to provide one place to find answers, but does not seek to create unique document for all problems - which would be an impossible task.

Syndicating does three things:

1. It separates the "wheat from the chafe" by promoting valuable content above less useful content.

2. It removes duplication of content by using the web to link to documents instead of repeating them.

3. It provides value by allowing more knowledge to be wrapped around the original source document, such as discussions, feedback, additional content, and so on.

Why bother syndicating, if the doc already exists?

There is a lot of information out there, of variable quality and usefulness. The VIOPS community exists for people to share their successful paths through the jungle of content, and highlighting content to separate the wheat from the chafe is a way of helping each other.

What content can be syndicated?

Anything, from anywhere, that is judged as valuable by an expert in the VIOPS community as something that will provide value (help, guidance) to other users.

Kb articles, white papers, technotes, user guides - if it is useful, practical and has achieves the objective of providing guidance that is followable by VIOPS users, then it is a candidate for syndication.

Who can syndicate documents?

Any registered VIOPS user, but the final publication approval is made by a core member of the VIOPS team who will check the quality of the syndicated content through a lightweight and fast approval process

How do you syndicate content?

Really easy. Follow these steps:

• Choose whether to do the work or not.

• If you choose NOT to do the work, but still think it's worth syndicating, then send a PM to John Roche.

• If you choose to do the work to syndicate a doc into VIOPS, then read on!

• Copy the following text into the clipboard, ready to paste it into your new document:

_{copy from below this line}

Introduction

A paragraph to explain the value of the syndicated document

Intended Audience

What job role(s) will find this document useful, such as VCP?

And how will they find it useful, such as "when designing their VMware Infrastructure solution"?

Outline

This should be bullet/numbered list of the main headers/ToC from the source doc.

Change the header of this section to reflect the opening position of the document, such as an Executive Summary or other text that provides a nice intro to the document so that the reader gets a "feel" for the doc and a desire to read on.

Change the ehader of this section to offer the final results of the document, or the key points. This should provide enough information to not have to open the document to get an idea of what it really has to say, but on the other hand should not provide all the data from the original doc.

^{copy above the line}

• Create a new document in the "right" community - just pick one that makes sense to you, it can be changed later.

• Paste the content from above into the new doc, put a good Title in and some Tags, and click Save Draft

• Now start to Edit Document to add value into the syndicate wrapper, and provide a link to the source document in both the Resources section and in one of the other major sections such as below the Outline.