by Mitch Tulloch
Windows

Getting support for Microsoft products via blogs

October 15, 2008, 05:00 AM — 

A few months ago in this tip, I pointed you to a page on Microsoft TechNet that I call “the IT pro’s home page for technical info on microsoft.com." While this page is a good starting point for exploring official technical documentation concerning Microsoft products, there are other great sources of info out there as well. Today let's look at Microsoft blogs.

In the old days, the Microsoft Knowledge Base on TechNet ruled whenever you need to find technical information concerning an issue with some Microsoft product. Times are changing however, and Microsoft seems to be providing more and more technical and support information for their products via blogs. Here are three ways of keeping in touch with the flood of blog posts coming out of Redmond these days.

First, check out this list of Official Microsoft Team Blogs. What's important about this list is that these are "official" blogs published by product teams at Microsoft, which means the information in these blogs can be relied upon for support purposes when you are implementing, configuring, or troubleshooting products. On this page you can pick and choose the blogs you're interested in and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

Another way to digest this mountain of information is BlogMS, which publishes a weekly summary of everything being posted on all the official team blogs. BlogMS is a terrific resource maintained by Daniel Good, a Technical Account Manager working in Microsoft Services Premier Support.

Finally, if you want to troll more widely for information on all (individual and team) Microsoft blogs, you can use the Microsoft Community Blogs page on Microsoft TechNet to do this. What's great about this page is that you can search blogs or individual posts for specific keywords.

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