Microsoft has announced the preview release of its documentation service, https://docs.microsoft.com, which currently provides content for its Enterprise Mobility products.
“We interviewed and surveyed hundreds of developers and IT Pros and sifted through your website feedback over the years on UserVoice. It was clear we needed to make a change and create a modern web experience for content…For years customers have told us to go beyond walls of text with feature-level content and help them implement solutions to their business problems.” (source)
The key features are:
- Improved readability
- “To improve content readability, we changed the site to have a set content width.”
- “We’ve also increased the font size for the left navigation and the text itself.”
- Including an estimated reading time
- Adding a publication date
- Improved navigation
- It is now based around sections on evaluating, getting started, planning, deploying, managing and troubleshooting
- Shortened article length per page
- Responsive Web Design
- Community contributions
- “Every article has an Edit button that takes you to the source Markdown file in GitHub, where you can easily submit a pull request to fix or improve content.”
- Feedback mechanisms
- To provide comments and annotations on all of the articles
- Friendly URLs
- Website theming
- You can change between a light and dark theme
Wow – this matches closely with the topics we cover in our Advanced technical writing & new trends in technical communication training course, where we look at the changes made by other organisations.
Although it doesn’t mention it in its announcement, Microsoft has also made changes to the style of its topic headings and content. There’s frequent use of words and phrases such as “protect”, “discover” and “understand and explore”.
We’ve yet to look at the site in detail, but initial impressions are very positive.
What do you think?
Simple question… If I want to know exactly what Microsoft Enterprise Mobility is, where do I find that? I see nothing on this site that I would expect to contain a top-level overview. Are we saying top-level overviews are obsolete?
I looked quickly at the InTune documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/understand-explore/introduction-to-microsoft-intune) and was surprised to not find a Search feature. Does anyone else find it odd that there’s no search or index?
It’s the preview release, so I guess that will come in the final version.
It’s covered here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/understand-explore/introduction-to-microsoft-intune
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