Microsoft has combined its existing support sites — support.office.com and support.microsoft.com — into one unified portal, allowing users to find support and troubleshooting articles for Microsoft 365 on a single site.
New Microsoft support website in the making
The new support site has also brought about a slew of changes and improvements to Windows release notes, the Windows update history pages, and related articles.
Microsoft is also working to bring a series of additional changes under the hood. For instance, Microsoft will make changes to formatting, the user interface (UI), and the type of metadata available for the new support site.
In its blog post, Microsoft had this to say:
“In addition to making it easier to locate relevant support articles when using a search engine, the consolidation of these two information experiences (increases our ability to quickly publish new articles and keep existing articles up to date.”
Microsoft will roll out the following changes in the coming weeks:
New URL structure
The new URL structure consists of the knowledge base (KB) ID on the page itself, allowing users to search for support articles by KB ID and differentiate between similar-looking articles.
Social Media sharing buttons
Microsoft has added new social media sharing buttons on the support page. You will soon be able to share support articles on Facebook and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, the email-sharing option remains unchanged.
No changes to the content delivery
Microsoft is combining its content management system (CMS) and web endpoints without making changes to its content delivery strategy. These changes won’t affect the company’s strategy to release documentation related to existing support articles dating back to 2016, in addition to new articles for operating systems and those supported by extended security updates (ESUs). What’s more, content delivery for existing channels will also remain unaffected.
Metadata changes
For now, Microsoft renders support articles in JSON on the client. This changes with the new support site. The new support.microsoft.com site will render articles in HTML. Meaning, article metadata will be rendered in a block of meta tags, unlike with JSON. Some metadata that was previously available in JSON will be rendered in HTML.
