docs.microsoft.com is now learn.microsoft.com

For fucks sake why do they do this every year

damnit microsoft. Just pick one and stick with it.

So all of the technet-to-docs URLs we spent years updating/fixing are going to be all broken again? Great Microsoft...Thanks, you're fantastic. Gold star.

I want names of people who make these decisions...

And any handy bookmark you had from before will now give you a 404 page. But at least the 404 page usually gives you a link to the new location.

I don't get any 404 on any of my docs bookmarks, they all work and redirect me.

Msdn, technet, docs, learn... When does it end?

I wonder what this means for all the URLs from docs I have saved in the web archive.....change histories will be harder.

Thanks for the heads up I guess. :(

This is almost as dumb as how they are constantly moving things from the exchange portal to the security portal to the defender portal and back again and every time I need to do a simple quarantine check or email search it take me three hours to find it’s new location because it’s move 8 times in two months.

We have a certain vendor who relocated their KB over a year ago and still link us to their old articles. It “404”s and tells you to search by the article title to get to the new page, but their KB article links don’t have the title in them. It is beyond frustrating.

This is one of the main reasons I set up my own wiki. I have a Dokuwiki I use to copy/paste useful KB articles, along with my own personal documentation. I'll still link to the original for reference purposes, but bookmarks alone failed me 1 too many times long ago.

After 10 years with the company, I do not miss the constant rebranding. It's just as bad for us. Too often, internal documentation gets updated just in time for the next rebranding. I don't know what I would have done without the ability to search previous cases.

They just love changing things just for kicks.

That's a very interesting subtle shift. Anyone else see it?

"docs" implies documentation, as in the instructions for using the product you bought and deployed and are trying to solve a problem in your environment for. "learn" to me implies a much more service-oriented approach, as in "Here's training on how to click the buttons and turn the SaaS knobs on the service we're graciously exposing for you." Just seems to me like another signal that on-prem will be abandoned or absorbed into Azure Stack soon.

Or, maybe it's nothing and they just killed off a bunch of training divisions and gave in to letting the developers write their own docs.

As a dev I can tell you microsoft official documentation is an absolute last resort when trying to get something to work. More chance of finding an answer about how something works in a pornhub comment than in the official docs.

They certainly do love to dick around with stuff though, like the new blank program.cs that some bored dev came up with, following Joel Spolsky's comments about architecture astronauts wanting to abstract things into oblivion.

They changed it, then posted on github asking people to vote if they liked it. The vast majority said no. They didn't change it back...

I guess I’d rather bookmark the archive.org copy of the pages, if that even works.

It's pretty fucked up when you click help on Windows 10 and get 404s because Microsoft can't leave shit alone... And don't get me started on aka.ms bullshit.

Looking forward to the grok.microsoft.com transition in a few years.

Oh for god's sakes. I wondered why lots of Google searches were now giving duplicate results.

Fucking put it back.

Idiots. Idiots. Idiots. And more idiots. Can't they understand the real value behind continuity and stability of things?

Thank you!

Sigh. Microsoft’s useless branding department strikes again.

$50 says Microsoft Teams gets rebranded to Microsoft Viva within 18 months

What's even more frustrating is that they move the pages that are hardcoded into apps and support pages. I can't even realistically count the number of times I went to read a support doc only to find Microsoft's classic this page no longer exists...

No forwards, just.. gone...

Pretty much how I soon hope our last remaining Windows Servers will be.. Just gone.

At HPE We’ve been spending the last several years rearranging our docs, Google has sofa king many busted links now.

They really need to put in a 301 every time they move one. It’s rather annoying even being internal, it’s gotta drive the customers nuts.

Heads up. Next year they’ll change it to kb.microsoft.con 👍🏼 because why not 🤣

(I meant .com really 🤪)

This is a good example of why I copy and paste articles and link the original source.

You never know when shit like this happens.

All of mine redirects, thank god (Microsoft).

Can Microsoft please stop changing something every single month? Microsoft is a fucking mess.

I just checked 10 random docs.microsoft.com bookmarks that I have and they all redirected without any issue.

I don't doubt there's some that will be broken though.

Don't care what url they are using redirect traffic to the new site/page

So documentation won't be updated until a month before the change it again? In 6 months.

Need to rename answers.microsoft.com to chkdsk.microsoft.com too.

Why exactly are you still wasting time with MSFT when looking to solve a MSFT problem? I've been doing this for 30 years. If I want to know when there is an issue with Azure or O365, I look to my Twitter alerts, as MSFT updates their own site too slowly. If i need help on a MSFT problem I look to Reddit. I gave up on MSFT being able to answer issues with their own stack.

The last update also wants to pitch office 365 to me before I'm allowed back into Windows after a reboot. Even though I already have an E3 license, on the same Computer.

I mean, why check that I'm already paying you before you hold my OS for ransom...

$ curl -s -I https://docs.microsoft.com/ | grep -e '^HTTP/' -i -e '^location:'
HTTP/2 301 
location: https://learn.microsoft.com/
$ curl -s -I https://docs.microsoft.com/foobar | grep -e '^HTTP/' -i -e '^location:'
HTTP/2 301 
location: https://learn.microsoft.com/foobar
$

Conspiracy: they are using all the docs info in their own proprietary code and this helps them potentially get rid of the evidence

Ready for round two of massive Microsoft sub domain hijacks? 😑

It is how companies on Microsoft's planned obsolescence cycle finally agree to upgrade.

Damn people get really upset about minor changes. Surely one can make a script that updates URLs to replace "docs." with "learn." within the course of a year.

For this and the bizarre licenses on docs.microsoft.com, I've been using the GitHub sources for some of these for a while now.

Ugh… can we please just bring back technet?

thank you

What the fuck learn is something different entirely??

Way back machine saves the day again. Couldn't believe how many 404s there were when studying for my MCSE

At Microsoft’s scale, I can’t wait for all the broken links now and into the future again when keeping track of redirects doesn’t work as expected. Post the previous generations (Technet, etc.), this was fixing something that wasn’t broken, could have left it the way it was for a long time. There has to be better things to work on and improve at Microsoft.

Thanks doc. Err... I mean learn

These mfs are a pain in my ass every day

But why

On another subject about this site - Is there a free web template available of it? Would like to use the layout / features for an internal IT doc site... I was messing around with some neat Wordpress setups, but the MS docs site would be sweet to have. Any chance anyone know if it's available for download or maybe even opensource (wishful thinking here)?

Jesus

FFS again?!?!

They really need a new UX lead across their platforms. This is why I bailed to Apple for my daily.

Sigh. At least the exams are still free at esi.microsoft.com

I miss technet and it's layout. I miss all the articles for ancient issues that they got rid of. It's not like the problems went away.

old urls better redirect correctly

This just in from the Quota of Unnecessary Changes department.

docs. makes more sense than learn. subdomain.

This sort of reminds of last place I worked with a rotating marketing director... new email sigs, the need to change logos, letterheads, pngs, then they look at domains...

Constant changes and nothing ever being completed was the main reason why we went away from Microsoft. User training could never be completed before they changed something. And it was slow and unreliable.

Did you notice how much they keep changing SKUs of Teams plane? I mean half the changes MS does, don't make any fking sense at all. Docs was fine as it is but "oh no! We gotta make it learn boys" . 😅😅

They make so many changes that breaks so many links, it's impossible to keep up to date with anything. Feels like I need to archive pages to PDF otherwise I'll never find them again. Hooray for broken links in documentation, Google searches, GitHub and all...

How come no M$ employees have commented? Scared?