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I'm Mike Kelly, Group Program Manager for Office Assistance - you probably know my team best as the team that manages https://office.microsoft.com. We also do all the assistance features for Microsoft Office - yup, we're the team that gave you Clippy -- and then killed him off! We also made Office search for help on our web site by default, which is either great or terrible, depending on where you sit - send me feedback on that!

We have the MVPs here on the Microsoft campus this week. This is a tremendous group of people who help Microsoft customers through volunteer participation in the newsgroups, communities, user groups, etc. Many are among the most knowledgable people I've met on Microsoft technology.

We got an earful today on connected help. We still think it's the best thing in the long run since it enables us to update help content daily. In the past, we'd write the help for a version of Office - and then six months later, find that we know a LOT more about where people are having trouble, but without anything to do on it other than write KB articles for our support site. Now, we're able to actually change the help content that people see right from the product when we identify a trouble spot. We have writers updating content and adding new articles every day. 

Tell me what you think!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2004
    Mike,

    Glad to see you dipping your toe in the blogging water! :)

    Come and talk to us on the private MVP newsgroups.

    You may well get another "earful" about Office 2003 "Help" (I use the term loosely).

    The claim that Office 2003 "Help" is the best thing in the long run would stack up better if the short run experience weren't so bad.

    It would be great to see Office 2003 Help actually ... well ... help.

    I think that probably all Office MVPs want better quality Office 2003 Help but to achieve that we need to correctly identify the current problems and remedy them.

    So, come and visit us on the private MVP newsgroups and let's see if we can't move this forward to a situation which gives a much better customer-centered experience.

    Andrew Watt
    MVP - InfoPath

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2004
    Ack!

    I can't believe that a Mike Kelly was responsible for Clippy ...

    the horror ... the horror!

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2004
    Mike...Clippy is not dead in 2003 - he's just not on by default...

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2006
    Connected help is totally disruptive  because it takes several seconds to respond, and this completely breaks the flow of using the application.  It's especially disruptive because you know it should be fast. It would be much better to either have background downloads of updates to help, or to have another thread running in the background that can take its time to search online and point you to updated online information if available.

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2009
    PingBack from http://pooltoysite.info/story.php?id=10477