Microsoft Docs no longer exists. Or should I say: once again Docs.com is in search of its purpose. If you work with #Microsoft technology in a professional way, you will surely be a heavy user of docs.microsoft.com pages. Except now all those links will redirecet to learn.microsoft.com instead. We all know MS loves rebranding. They are not afraid to kill brands that their customers have grown fond of. Heck, MS has even tried to rebrand #Office365 to #Microsoft365. If they're willing to sacrifice Office, no brand is safe. I believ MS Docs has been a much liked service, due to the considerable improvement on technical documentation that has taken place during its existence. That was 2018-2022. The content of course still exists in MS Learn, but Docs as a brand has again been set free. The first instances of a Docs.com service was launched in collaboration with #Facebook in 2010. 5 years later MS took it fully under its own control and tried to tightly couple it with the Office products, as a channel for publicly sharing documents created with Office tools. In the same year they also folder their content curation site Curah! into it. Along came the #LinkedIn acquisition in 2017. #SlideShare was part of the deal, so MS announced "we no longer need Docs.com since SlideShare is the ideal platform for publishing your documents". Since LinkedIn remained such a separate entity from core MS, nothing good happened with that plan. 3 years later SlideShare was sold to #Scribd (who then put up a paywall around all the presentations people had ever shared via it). Docs.com was the short URL to docs.microsoft.com that marked the technical documenation era of MS Docs. Now that everything has been rebranded under #MicrosoftLearn, it's interesting to see what the next reincarnation of Docs.com will be. Any guesses on where we might see MS Docs next?
Suhail Sayed
1y
Wasn't aware of this history..Thank you for sharing
Hopefully they use viva topics kind technology and ingest it into their products? The way like in power automate contextual help and guidance is offered? Or like microsoft 365 admin center support section?
Microsoft MVP Security | MCT | Security & Compliance Architect at Sulava
1yThanks for the interesting background information. Maybe in this iteration we'll finally get an easy path (MS Learn API, anyone? 😶) to programmatically track both new and updated technical articles filtered to results only from the desired products. I tried to build a few automations for that purpose at different times during the last year or two, both against the backend in GitHub and by hacking around with the website's built-in search functionality's RSS feed option, but without achieving the desired results.. 😥