Got Server Content?

You do? Where shall we put that then? No, I mean where shall we put it so people can actually see it?

There’s a ton of great stuff out there about Sun products, and it changes all the time. The trouble is, on sun.com, we sometimes don’t keep up with all the new and updated content out there. This is because we’ve often not really had a good place to surface it on our traditional product landing pages. Think servers, or storage, or software. Those product areas have their own discrete content areas on sun.com, where you might expect a reasonable refresh rate. In particular, the Overview pages in those product areas – the pages you hit at /servers, /storage, /software – should probably be the stickiest pages we can build, with constantly refreshed content. It’s always nice to see new content when you go back to a page. It gives the impression it might actually be current.

Up until very recently, the servers landing page on sun.com wasn’t really a landing page at all. You just landed quite unceremoniously at a server finder, where you were kind of expected to fend for yourself. Fine, of course, if you know what you’re looking for, or if you have some sense of the kind of product attributes that make up the ideal server for your particular business needs. Not so great if you don’t even know what a server is, or does. Or maybe you just want to know how Sun servers can help you, before you actually have to start choosing one. All the kind of stuff we loosely describe as content ‘which tells the product story’. You know, delivering key messages, addressing market sectors, providing system solutions, all that kind of stuff.

A few weeks ago, we put together a servers overview page, so that we could do that story telling, provide sensible paths into product areas, uplevel featured products, show off some great customer success stories, and, yes, tell you what our servers actually are. It’s a delicate balance on these pages between getting the story out there and providing a quick route to the products, but I think we managed it pretty well. I say ‘we’, but, of course, it was the good folks in the product marketing teams that pulled all the content together (kudos Carlos & Lisa), and our publishing team that managed the tricky icky problem of integrating the new content with the existing server finder (heroics from Jing). I just did the bit where I say ‘you’d be better of with a PC00 component there’.

While we were working that project, there was another altogether more dynamic project going on in the design room next door (there’s not a really a design room next door to me, but you know what I mean). A few months ago, the systems group here at Sun, that looks after the server product line, had an idea that they wanted to explore. It was really about addressing the problem I mentioned at the start – there’s great, current content out there, that has marketing dollars behind it, and a plan to develop it, but not a really great place to showcase it. Based on the kind of presentation we use for the product launch events on sun.com, they wanted to see what we could do to support their idea of ‘content channels’. A little bit launch, a little bit back story, a little bit promotion, a whole lot more interesting than a big top banner.

The result is what you now see on the top of the new servers overview page. A rather nice mix of videos, podcasts, product tours, white papers and other supercool server stories (those product tours are very nice. I took the PSU out of a Sun Fire X4140 just now). So now, when you come back to the servers section on sun.com, you can expect regular updates, announcements, product walkthroughs and all that jazz – all hand-picked by your server channel content owners. If you can’t hear it, that’s the sound of a gauntlet dropping to the floor of Menlo Park, by the way…

If its not immediately apparent, this is a product category landing page without right-hand navigation. Well, I’m excited.

Listening Post: Psychedelic Furs: All Of This and Nothing