Editor's Note - November, 2001

"Community" and Support

In my last column, I noted that there's now stuff all over TechNet - and MSDN and microsoft.com - about community.

Over the years, a few thousand Microsoft public newsgroups have sprung up, sometimes nurtured by us, albeit in fits and starts, sometimes treated with benign neglect. Some good stuff has been happening in these communities. Users are helping other users. People are asking questions. People are answering questions. People are supporting each other.

I like it.

I'm Not Digressing, But…

Tech Support is generally a lose-lose proposition. We know it costs you serious money to call us, and so you try to avoid calling. We also lose money on these calls. (Our tech support center, PSS, has its own internal P&L, and overall it is an L, not a P.) Sure, some calls we can answer in 60 seconds. But in Professional and Premier support, we often spend a dozen hours or more researching a question, recreating the situation in a lab, and recruiting our own assistance inside Support or in the product groups before we get back to the caller with an answer.

So in a minute I'm going to offer a suggestion to make PSS an even bigger L.

Stop making those 60-second calls. Use TechNet and community resources instead.

Those 60-second calls - we've all heard the story about the person who calls a pay-for-support line somewhere, waits in a phone queue, talks to someone invariably described as "a kid," and the "kid" reads the answer to them out of a document somewhere.

Now put aside for the minute the value-vs-cost aspect - if you're blocked in your work, if you suspect you'd spend hours of your time trying to solve it yourself, if other people are waiting on you, then this 60-second call has a high payback. If you need to make that call, if you need to solve the problem immediately, if minutes count, then call us. (The same logic applies to a fee-support call to any vendor, in any industry.) But if you can afford to spend a few minutes over the course of a few hours looking for help in other ways, I've got some ideas I'd like you to consider.

Psst! Here's Where We Keep the Answers

First, if "the kid" is at Microsoft (and some of these "kids" are even older than I am, and most are smarter), the "document" he or she is reading from is called the Knowledge Base (KB). Almost all of it is public. We carry it on TechNet on line, or in a portable, easier-to-search form in a TechNet subscription.

I'm the first to admit that the KB is hard to parse if you don't speak Microsoft-ese. Why write "permissions" if you can use "ACLs," right? Here's the scoop - the KB was originally written by support engineers, for support engineers, in the precise languages of Microsoft technology. When we made it public, we didn't rewrite all 300,000+ articles. We add new articles - yes, still written by and for support engineers - most every day.

So start in the same place our support engineers start - the KB. Try synonyms if you're stuck. Chances are really good that the answer's in there, if sometimes next to impossible to find.

Okay, you tried the KB, and you didn't find the answer, or you couldn't figure out how to apply it to your situation. Now should you call Support?

Not so fast. So far, you've spent about five minutes researching the issue. If time permits, here's a great way to spend ten more spread out over the next few hours.

Ask your colleagues.

Now wait a minute, you say. That was the first thing you did! You even tried to ask the 14-year-old down the block, but she wasn't home.

Okay, let me be more specific. Ask your peers across the world.

What Does Community Have to Do With Support?

As I said last time, the microsoft.public newsgroups are a giant slow-motion conference call of thousands of users, from novice to expert. Most of the folks in the newsgroups listed on TechNet are IT professionals. There are no requirements for reading or writing in a newsgroup, and you can choose to be anonymous.

For those new to newsgroups, they're like a huge e-mail conversation, except that you can read everyone's mail. (Just think of it as the world's biggest CC list.) People ask questions. People answer questions. People offer suggestions. And yes, occasionally a few people are rude, or someone with too much time on their hands "spams the newsgroup" (that is, posts ads or other irrelevant material). But overall, they're a terrific resource.

And like e-mail, you can read past posts. You may find your problem already solved.

If not, ask for help. Describe your problem as specifically as you can. Then check back in a few hours.

Not all posts get answered. Not all answers are good answers. Not all answers come back in just a few hours. But it often works amazingly well. There are folks out there with an incredible depth of knowledge. (Some of them even work for Microsoft. Many of our support engineers, along with some of the developers who wrote the code, participate in our newsgroups.)

How do you get started? If you're new to this, let me suggest our web-based newsreader. It lists in the left-hand navigation tree about 100 newsgroups that are particularly pertinent to IT folks. Click on the plus sign next to a product name to show the relevant newsgroups; then choose your newsgroup. The rest is reasonably straightforward.

If you're not sure which newsgroup best applies, sample as many as you like. Read through the recent posts to see if people are asking questions similar to yours, or if respondents have expertise that might apply.

And if you've got a few more minutes, please take time to see if there are some open questions that you can answer. I haven't used the word "karma" in 30 years, but it really does apply here.

Dialing for Answers

If all else fails, remember that Microsoft Support is here to help you. They'll hate me for saying this, but stick them with the tough questions; for most issues, self-support is easier and cheaper - and sometimes, on a bad phone day, faster. They really try to keep wait times short, but backups do happen. (Murphy's Law: the greater your panic, the longer the wait time. Or maybe that's Dilbert's Law.)

As I said, you can always call Tech Support. But there are lots of ways to avoid that phone call, by calling instead on your peer community. You can find all of our community resources in the TechNet Community Center.

Community Events

Five quickies:

• Jim Gray. If you know databases, you know Jim's name. He built the first actual SQL database (at IBM a few decades ago), he won the Turing Prize a few years ago, and he's now a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. He's also an incredibly creative thinker. On December 4th at 10:00am PST, join him for a Q&A session on "The Search for Petabyte Storage." He's been looking at large database-type apps - Google, Hotmail, CERN, etc. - that are either at a petabyte or will grow to a petabyte scale in the next year or so. Don't miss this. (That's not hype. He's one of a handful of people in this industry I'd radically rearrange my schedule to hear or chat with.)

• Want the scoop on setting up a VPN David Eitelbach and Rob Trace of our Network Insfrastructure product-dev team will do an online Q&A on November 20th at 10:00am PST. Topics: Using VPN connections for remote access or for site-to-site router connections; why Microsoft supports the L2TP/IPSec standard protocol versus the IPSec Tunnel Mode proprietary protocols; and the EAP authentication protocols. They also said, "we can answer specific FAQ questions or deployment questions that listeners may have regarding remote access or site-to-site routing over VPNs." Sounds like a good offer to me.

• These are but two of our regularly irregular Q&A With the Insiders sessions. Click here for more.

• Tips for Techies. You might win a thrilling, latte-holding coffee mug (without the latte) for sharing a tech tip with other TechNet users. This is a great opportunity to share info and save folks lots of time. Or you might save time by reading these.

• Real People, Real Problems. With real solutions, of course. We look to our users to help each other by sharing technical "case studies," descriptions of a solution, involving Microsoft software, to a real-world problem. You won't see our Northwind Traders here, but you can read or write about the real world. We'll probably send one of those TechNet coffee mugs your way if we publish your piece.

Summing Up

Remember that you can put the Knowledge Base and our service packs in your hands - whether or not your Internet connection is fast the day you need this stuff - with your TechNet subscription. Think of a TechNet subscription as your security blanket. (A friend who also has a young child described it as "a giant diaper to contain IT messes." Your mileage may vary.)

Tell me your best self-support stories. As always, I can't promise to respond to every letter, but I do read them.

Steven B. Levy
Product Unit Manager
Microsoft TechNet