The SPSS Developer Central website is migrating

[Jon K Peck]

The Developer Central website is migrating to the SPSS Community in IBM myDeveloperWorks.
The new URL is www.ibm.com/developerworks/spssdevcentral.  myDeveloperWorks also gives you access to a vast set of information on other IBM technologies.  We invite you to visit and join the SPSS Community.

The SPSS Community has most of the material from Developer Central with the exception of some older, obsolete materials.
The Essentials and plug-in downloads and the SDK materials are also not yet available on the new site, but they continue to be available on Developer Central.  While much of the migrated material was only for SPSS Statistics, the new site is intended to be broader and to cover other IBM SPSS technologies.

The downloads on the new site are organized into collections.  Currently these are Statistical Tools, .NET Materials, Graphical Tools, Utilities, Python Modules, Extension Commands, and Data Collection.  An item can be in more than one collection.  You can comment on items and see the comments others have made.  Besides being easier to search than the old site, you can subscribe to email notification when an item changes or a comment is posted.  You can also now contribute your own items directly; the process is described in the community overview.

The articles section has been reorganized, and there is some new content.  There is an Articles wiki page with article overviews.

The insideout.spss.com blog is now hosted in this community, and you can read and comment on postings from the community page.

There is a bookmarks section linking to other useful pages and communities, including Ray Levesque's famous site, The Nabble SPSSX-L forum, the SPSS Google group, and the SPSS Facebook and Twitter pages.

If you have been using the Developer Central forums in the last few months, you have actually been using the forum facility on the new site.  There are forums for getting started with SPSS Statistics programmability, Python, R, and .NET programmability, Statistics syntax, the SPSS Community itself, Visualization, and IBM SPSS Modeler.  We will create additional forums as needed.  You can sign up to watch particular forums or individual items.

**The old Developer Central site is still operational, but we will not be updating the content, and it will go away some time in 2011. **

Anyone can read the contents of the SPSS Community, but downloading and posting require you to register on the DeveloperWorks site (free).  And we invite you to join the SPSS Community.  We wanted to migrate existing SPSS site registrations to the new site, but for various reasons we were unable to do that.

The collections in the SPSS Community have some new content you might not have seen if you haven't visited Developer Central lately.  One of the nice features of the collections facility is the ability to sort the items by date, so you can easily find new material.

We hope that you will like the new site: please post any comments in the SPSS Community forum mentioned above.

Regards,

Jon Peck
Senior Software Engineer, IBM
[hidden email]
312-651-3435