14 DAY TRIAL // February 17, 2009 marks the start of a process that involves moving the Microsoft support content to TechNet and MSDN. For the time being, Microsoft will only perform a test transition of just a few articles, in order to assess how search engines detect and index the materials. The evaluation has as deadline the end of February, by which time the Redmond company plans to step up its game with a massive migration of KB articles. Up to this point in time the software giant has failed to offer any specific dates as to when it plans for the transition of support content to TechNet and MSDN to be over.
Chris Kilbourn, the Lead Site Manager for TechNet in the STO (Server and Tools Online) group at Microsoft, revealed that the migration of Developer & IT Professional primary support content to MSDN and TechNet was a move designed to support developers and IT professionals. In this context, Microsoft is laboring to put Knowledge Base – or KB – articles at the disposal of members of the TechNet and MSDN communities, in an attempt to bring the mountain to Mohamed. Kilbourn argued that it made sense for developers and IT professionals to access KB articles via MSDN and TechNet, rather than having to turn to the support.microsoft.com website.
“With this shift, you’ll see a number of changes: all http://support.microsoft.com Web sites that provide support for IT Professionals and Developers will now be directed to MSDN or TechNet; the initial implementation begins on February 17, 2009 with the pilot launch of 20 support articles (KBs) in English and Japanese. When the team is satisfied that major search engines are picking up these changes in search results (which should be no later than February 28, 2009), we will then add more than 55,000 articles in Chinese-Traditional, Chinese-Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian and Spanish; [and] security/hotfix articles will not move to MSDN and TechNet immediately, although all IT Professional and Developer content will eventually move to MSDN or TechNet,” Kilbourn explained.