Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles Moving to TechNet and MSDN

Word today from Christopher Kilborn over at Port 80 that, as part of a larger initiative, Microsoft is relocating much of its Knowledge Base library. The money quote:

Microsoft is moving its Developer & IT Professional primary support content (also known as Knowledge Base – or KB - articles) from https://support.microsoft.com Web site to MSDN and TechNet, respectively. This move is to ensure that Developers and IT Professionals will see support information in the places they would most likely to be looking for it – and so that other, relevant or associated information can be more easily exposed alongside it.

With this shift, you’ll see a number of changes:

• All https://support.microsoft.com Web sites that provide support for IT Professionals and Developers will now be directed to MSDN or TechNet.
• The initial implementation begins on February 17, 2009 with the pilot launch of 20 support articles (KBs) in English and Japanese. When the team is satisfied that major search engines are picking up these changes in search results (which should be no later than February 28, 2009), we will than add more than 55,000 articles in Chinese-Traditional, Chinese-Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian and Spanish.
• Security/hotfix articles will not move to MSDN and TechNet immediately, although all IT Professional and Developer content will eventually move to MSDN or TechNet.

I’ll keep abreast of these changes in this space. I’ve added a KB Migration tag for your convenience.

Stay tuned..

-wp