New Office 2007 Supportability Feature:Unique Alert/Error ID

We've noticed that Over 25% of the support volume for Office 2003 is directly related to error messages. Quite often the customer will give the SE the general idea of what the error is saying and not the exact text string.  This makes finding the right prescriptive content difficult.  The unique ID addresses this problem

To ensure that issues get tracked and resolved faster, Office 2007 includes a supportability feature to help customers and support professional where there is an error message involved.  If you receive an error in an Office 2007 product you may hold down “CTRL + SHIFT + I” and a unique alertID will be exposed in the lower right-hand corner of the dialog box.  (Setup errors not included)  For example, after hitting “CTRL + SHIFT + I” the alertID “300034” becomes visible in the dialog below.

Key Benefits:

· The related support content will have this unique number as metadata to enable fast and accurate searches by customers and Support Engineers. 

· The numerical ID is language neutral so all relevant content can be easily found regardless of the language in which it is written.

· Many alerts/errors are very similar in verbiage such as “Out of memory”, “Not enough memory” and “Insufficient memory”.  .

· The top hitting errors can then be dynamically addressed in the current version via update services by adding “Infotext” to the dialog. 

And what on earth is "InfoText" ! Stay tuned for next post !!