TechNet 2.0 – Episode 4 – Troubleshooting and Download Finders

re: TechNet 2.0 – Episode 4 – Troubleshooting and Download Finders

Martin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:37:59 GMT

Keith,

From a usability standpoint, there are two related problems. Neither of these are MS specific, but it's time to do something about them.

1) The accumulated forum discussions & NNTP threads in the Microsoft domain cause a slowdown in info retrieval. Even the guys with the troubleshooting solutions around MS are plagued with this info overload. The community is SO active and involved that a common response is that the question has been answered before, so "Google it."

2) When troubleshooting, the search engine model (generating a link) just adds another step between the user and the answer (s)he wants. Instead of a solution, I get a mystery link with a cryptic preview blurb. How tiresome. On top of that, most of the links the engine sends him/her to are not the right answer.

I'd like you guys to explore three solutions to this:

1) Follow the TechNet Library and the CodePlex site models and create a troubleshooting Wiki. In order not to clutter the entries -- a common problem in Wikipedia articles -- it might prove useful to establish two levels of user edits: Expert and Layperson. Page edits added by MVP-level users should not be modifiable by Laypeople -- only by other MVP-level users.

2) A time-saving data dump (call it what you will). If I'm looking for a solution, I would like to have all the linked pages compiled immediately on a single page, relevant or not. It will save me time -- I can keyword search the data dump, rather than click mystery links. I suppose I can just find a bookmarklet for this, but the ideal solution would have the search engine eliminate duplicate results in compiling this page.

3) Enable user voting on search results, as well as tagging. To reduce duplicate entries in search results, you might even use a Silverlight-based social search solution, allowing users to manually "cluster" results with each other if they are substantially the same or related. (Open all URLs in new tabs or a sidebar, and keep the search results displayed as "tiles" that can be dragged and dropped into clusters. The MS servers would tally this semantic data to aid all subsequent searches.)

If you want more feedback, contact me at alsoknownas on the live.com domain.

re: TechNet 2.0 – Episode 4 – Troubleshooting and Download Finders

Colin Hodgson — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:42:12 GMT

As we have the RSS feeds available in Outlook 2010, it would be ideal if we could subscribe to a particular KB that is updated regularly.

re: TechNet 2.0 – Episode 4 – Troubleshooting and Download Finders

Alex.B.Chalmers — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:54:51 GMT

I completely agree with knowing KB articles by number. What I would really like to see is a way to be notified of updates to specific articles.

Take 822158 (av exclusion recommendations) or 894199 (WSUS content updates for 2010) as examples. Both of these articles are frequently updated, and both provide valuable information for continuing operations and proactive maintenance.

Ideally, I would like to subscribe to a set of these types of articles using a dynamically generated RSS feed or similar mechanism, but I'd go with anything that works.

re: TechNet 2.0 – Episode 4 – Troubleshooting and Download Finders

alt-92 — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:25:58 GMT

Searching for KB articles just seems a bit.. well.. superfluous actually.

Seeing that it's just as easy to prepend support.microsoft.com/kb/<kbnumber> to jump straight to the article, I'm thinking about building an IE accellerator or FF Addin to that effect. Just select the kb number & jump.