Safari Books Online: Five Ways to Make the Most of Your Subscription

CIO — In 2004, Sun Microsystems purchased a subscription to Safari Books Online, the leading web-based provider of publications for technical professionals. The subscription gave 1,000 Sun engineers access to Safari Books' database of thousands of electronic books and articles. Today, Safari Books also offers to subscribers access to unfinished manuscripts known as Rough Cuts and online training videos.

Soon after Sun rolled out Safari Books to its first 1,000 users, hundreds of other Sun employees began clamoring for access to it, according to Christy Confetti Higgins, a program manager in Sun's Digital Libraries and Research group—a team of four people within Sun's Learning Services organization, which provides e-learning and training content for the company. (The Digital Libraries and Research group is responsible for making sure Sun's 34,000 employees have access to all the e-books, online journals and market research they need to do their jobs.) These other Sun employees also wanted at-their-fingertips access to technical content from such publishers as O'Reilly Media, SMI Press, Peachpit, lynda.com, Addison-Wesley and Pearson (Safari Books Online is a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson). Higgins said she had to kick inactive users off the subscription to make room for employees on a waiting list.

The following year, Sun purchased another 1,000 seats on its Safari Books subscription, and eventually Higgins' group received enough funding to extend access to Safari Books Online across Sun. (According to Safari Books' website, a 12-month corporate subscription to its premium library, which includes both technology and business books, for five users costs $519.) Today, 5,000 Sun employees actively use Safari Books Online to get answers to pressing technical questions, to learn new technologies, to read books on management and to provide feedback to book authors.

"Having early access to information before it's in full e-book form, before it's available in print and before most others have access to it is a pretty big competitive advantage to an engineering company like Sun," says Higgins.

After all, the subscription to Safari Books Online lets Sun's technical workers keep their skills up to date and remain at the forefront of the ever-changing technology landscape.

Neeraj Mathur, a principal web technologist and technical program manager with Sun, says Safari Books Online is an invaluable resource. Just as humans can't survive without water, engineers can't survive without quick access to information, he says. "If I didn't have Safari Books Online, I'd be spending a lot of money buying physical books and lugging them around." That would be a heavy load for Mathur to shuttle between his three offices: one in Menlo Park, Calif., and two in India.

Sun's deployment of Safari Books Online has been successful because the company has purchased a resource that's truly valuable to employees, because Sun has properly promoted it, and because Sun has made it easy for employees to access. According to a May 2008 report from Forrester Research on learning strategies, for training and educational resources to be effective, employees must be comfortable with them, and the tools must be placed in the context of the work they need to complete on a day to day basis. That's certainly the case with Safari Books Online.

If you're having problems getting users to adopt training and educational tools you've deployed, you might want to take a cue from the measures Sun Microsystems took to promote the use of Safari Books Online.

For more best practices on providing training to technology staff, see Six Best Practices for Delivering IT Training.

1. Integrate it with your Google Search Appliance.

Sun's Learning Services organization originally deployed Google's Search Appliance in 2007 on a learning portal for employees so that when employees needed information on particular topic, say Java Beans, they could use Google to search all of Sun's internal content on Java Beans, which includes courses, technical documentation and marketing materials, as well as content from external third parties, such as market researchers.

In the course of deploying the Google Search Appliance, the Learning Services organization decided to integrate the Google product with Safari Books Online. The group wanted Safari Books' content to show up in search results when people used Google. Higgins says the goal in integrating Safari Books with the Google search appliance was to make Sun employees aware that Safari Books was a new resource available at their fingertips.

Higgins says members of Sun's learning services organization worked with engineers from Safari to create a module called a One Box that's part of Google's Search Appliance. The One Box allows users to hook external content into Google's search results. So when a user types a keyword into the search box, the One Box sends a query to Safari Books through a gateway and brings back two examples of relevant results from Safari Books as well as a link to all the other relevant results from Safari. When a user clicks on one of the results from Safari, they automatically get sent directly to Sun's Safari Books Online page.

2. Integrate the training service with key websites inside your company.

Sun's Digital Libraries and Research group put links to Safari Books Online on internal websites geared toward the employees who use Safari Books the most: Sun engineers and members of the company's research and development staff. One of these engineering websites, OneStop, has an RSS feed from Safari that lets Sun engineers know when new books are available. Internal engineering wikis feature pages listing titles from SMI Press, which is a publishing partnership between Sun and Pearson.

"Our philosophy is to integrate the content where the users are," says Higgins. "We don't want to force people to go to a library page or to use the learning portal to get to Safari. We put the links where employees do their daily learning."

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