Cisco IronPort Knowledgebase Retired

[MARK SCHWANTJE]

I tried accessing the Cisco IronPort KB this morning only to find out that all articles have been removed. You are now supposed to utilize the TechNotes in the respective product page. How on earth are you supposed find anything in this convoluted mess? Am I really supposed to utilize the search bar in the upper right corner that searches through everything on the Cisco website? Clicking on each Subject item (i.e. Troubleshooting Technotes) is extremely inefficient and most of the time you don't find what you're looking for.
 

[Robert Sherwin]

Sorry to hear that Mark.  In being the one that implemented this change, and the preliminary project to migrate the old articles over to the Cisco.com publishing standards, I'll be happy to take the feedback.  This was noted to occur previous to now:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/blog/12176911/updated-access-customer-knowledge-base

I am already aware of some users unhappiness w/ the search aspects of the TechNotes.

Previously - the search mechanism was the same, albeit that was limited to the knowledge base articles per our previous board's engine.  Currently - we have to adhere to Cisco's publishing standards in writing and presenting our knowledge base articles - and that was one of the primary drivers for the change.  I hope that you'll find the articles at least a little more clean and uniform in presentation.  If not - you can submit feedback directly on the articles, and we take the results of what people find useful/not useful very seriously, and appreciate the feedback.

From within the advanced search - you can use the "ESA" tag when searching, it will limit results presented from Cisco.com.  It will return result directly relating to the Email Security Appliance:

http://tools.cisco.com/search/results/en/us/get/advsrch?q=ESA

Happy to help or address concerns that you have - just reach out to me and let me know - robsherw@cisco.com.  

-Robert

[MARK SCHWANTJE]

Hi Robert,

My venting really has nothing to do with what you did specifically. I realize that you had to move all the IronPort KB articles into Cisco's standards, and you're at the mercy of whatever those are. Unfortunately, their support interface, just as it has for so many years, is a huge mess and about as unfriendly as it can be. This just seems to be the final step in completing the shift from IronPort to Cisco, and like everything else, is a significant decline in the level of support that we once had. It started first with requiring to contact TAC for assistance, which led to your being assigned to offshore engineers who are no where near the caliber of the previous engineers, to now this extremely poor implementation of a knowledgebase. Its a shame that IronPort support has become what it is, because I used to consider it one of the best in the industry.