The next time Microsoft 359 craps itself, at least it'll be easier to hunt down help

Support and knowledge base articles consolidated into a single and search engine-friendly location

Microsoft has celebrated yet another tumble of its "365" services by consolidating its support sites into one location.

Sadly not a direct line to either Brad Anderson (corporate VP for Commercial Management Experiences), nor Jared Spataro (corporate VP for Microsoft 365), the plan is to lump together support.office.com and support.microsoft.com for the purpose of easing the pain of hunting down troubleshooting resources.

The update will see the knowledge base (KB) ID and GUID for the article popped into the URL (although the existing method of appending the KB ID to the URL will still work.)

The company expects the change will make things easier to find via search engine. It will also be delivering articles in HTML rather than serving them up as JSON objects and rendering them on the client. Metadata related to the article will also no longer be served as JSON, but instead turn up in meta tags.

Old hands at IT may raised a worried eyebrow at the notion of Microsoft "consolidating" support content. After all, memories of the The Great MSDN/TechNet Purge are still fresh in the minds of many despite the company's frantic backpedalling amid the outcry.

Thankfully, this time it appears that a repeat of the wholesale deletion is not on the cards. Microsoft merely hoped "these changes will make it easier for you to search for, and find, the resources you need to support and get the most out of your Windows and Office experience."

Those on the sharp end of recent outages will attest that the "experience" has not been great of late, no matter how easy it gets to hunt down an explanatory knowledge base article. ®