Microsoft's Online Support

Last week, Microsoft overhauled the support sections of their site. If you ever noticed the URLs to support documents before this change, you could see why MS wanted a change: the directory structure was somewhat haphazard. For example, each product has its own main "subdirectory" off of www.microsoft.com, like "\ntserver" and "\word". The "support" areas, however, had URLs with "support" tacked on, like "\NTWksSupport".

Furthermore, the support documents themselves were pretty much strewn all over microsoft.com. A lot were in the "\kb" directory (Knowledge Base), although some might be found in "\NTServer" or "\msdn".

This potpourri of documents was all referenced from the main Technical Support page for each product. A product's tech support page provided a Grand Central of support information, including links to the latest product downloads (updates/fixes); links to all related FAQs and "how to" articles; a cool query listing the very latest Knowledge Base articles for a product; and links to all related newsgroups; as well as a link to search the Knowledge Base on that product.

The New Structure

So Microsoft's answer was to force all "support" items into a new main URL: support.microsoft.com. From this page, you can search the Knowledge Base, or choose to view a listing of FAQs, downloads, or newsgroups by product.

The first noticeable change is that you can no longer access any support areas without being registered, which, while free, requires your time, a java-capable browser, and cookies.

The reason? So the main Search page can remember our last 20 queries, and whether our last search was by keyword or using natural language.

Furthermore, the product "Technical Support" pages, including NT Workstation Support, are history. And the new Support Online doesn't yet make up for the loss.

If you want news of the latest hotfixes, or an earlier Service Pack, you'll have to look elsewhere: the new, more generalized, "Downloads" section for Windows NT makes available only the latest Service Pack. (Note you can still get previous service packs, plus post-service pack hotfixes, from Microsoft's FTP site.)

Keep in mind that Paperbits lists updates to NT (including the latest hotfixes) by date, as well as the latest 3rd party commercial drivers.

MSDN Online Changes

Another huge change at Microsoft: the MSDN Library lost a good deal of its functionality for NT users: they've removed the current NT and Backoffice Resource Kits entirely (the names of the Resource Kits are still listed, but if you try to access them, you get a message about how to subscribe to MSDN and get them on CD). However, the full texts of other Resource Kits are still available at this library (including NT 3.51, Windows 95, and Office), so while I removed MSDN from the Top 5, I'm still listing the site on the Links page here.