[German]Microsoft plans to redesign the support pages for Microsoft Office and Windows in the future. On the support pages Redmond will provide information about updates for the respective products.
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In this Techcommunity article, Chris Morrissey explains the planned innovations. Microsoft has the two support pages first::
support.office.com and support.microsoft.com
into a unified support website. This takes into account the fact that Office and Windows are now offered under the term Microsoft 365. Although Morrissey does not communicate this way. Rather, it says that it wants to make it easier for users to find support and troubleshooting resources for Microsoft 365.
As part of these transformations, users will find a number of changes to the Windows release notes, Windows update history pages, and related informational articles. Behind the scenes, Microsoft is also making fundamental changes to the formatting, user interface, and type of metadata available.
This consolidation is not only intended to make it easier to find relevant support articles when using a search engine. Microsoft also hopes that it will be easier to publish new articles quickly and keep existing articles up to date. Microsoft plans to begin incorporating these changes in the coming weeks.
(Structure of the KB articles, click to zoom)
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The above screenshot of a support page shows how Microsoft wants to customize the URL to the respective KB articles. A part of the URL remains the same and consists of the country code for the language and the KB ID number. New is the domain and the introduction of a GUID number for the articles. The KB-ID number, which corresponds to the ID of the Knowledge Base (KB), is intended to improve the findability of the pages via search engines.
The current URL structure is: http://support.microsoft.com/[locale]/help/[kb-id]/[url-title]. To find an article by its KB-ID, you can simply add the KB-ID to the root URL https://support.microsoft.com/help – I found it quite convenient. But sometimes the KB-IDs are not listed in the article itself and can only be found within the KB-URL. The link between the KB ID and the article is not so strongly associated with the article by search engines, and articles can be harder to find, Microsoft writes. Let's see how it all looks at the end of the day. More details, including metadata changes, can be found in the Techcommunity article.
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