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Many Windows users don’t even bother to look at Microsoft’s Windows release notes, but those who do often pay close attention.
For those users who rely on information about Microsoft’s operating system, the company is preparing enhancements to the Windows release notes, Windows update history pages, and informational articles.
Reflecting Microsoft’s move to the Microsoft 365 suite for Windows 10, Office 365, and management tools, Microsoft is now merging the support.office.com and support.microsoft.com sites into one unified support site.
Users should be able to find troubleshooting and support resources for Microsoft 365 more easily when using a search engine, according to Microsoft. Additionally, the consolidation of the two sites helps Microsoft quickly publish new articles and update existing ones.
These changes will be implemented in the coming weeks, the company says.
Microsoft is also reformatting its URL structure for Windows 10 release notes, giving the KB article number (knowledge base) a more prominent position in the URL and on the page itself.
This change is designed to help users distinguish between two pages with similar-looking titles and to make it easier to find support articles by KB ID number.
As Microsoft points out, the existing URL structure also includes the KB ID that users can copy from the address bar and add to the root URL, https://support.microsoft.com/help. However, sometimes the KB IDs are not listed in the article and can only be seen in the URL. In these situations, it is more difficult to use search engines to find an article by KB ID.
“For consistency and to support improved search indexing, the future URL structure will include both the GUID and the KB ID. Since many are familiar with adding the KB ID to the URL, we will continue to support this approach. And we’ll use automatic redirects to make sure we get to the appropriate article, “explains Microsoft.
Windows 10 release notes pages currently only support article sharing via email. Microsoft is updating the sharing options to include Facebook and LinkedIn. Sharing controls will be at the bottom of every page.
There are no changes to the content strategy of Microsoft’s current release note, which includes monthly security updates (week B releases), non-security updates (preview releases), and out-of-band updates (releases OOB).
You are also modifying the format, user interface, and type of metadata available, which may affect the tools administrators use to organize Microsoft release notes and support.
Articles on support.microsoft.com will no longer display articles in JSON format, which are then rendered on the client, but will instead render them in HTML. Also, the metadata for each article will no longer be served as JSON and will instead be displayed in a meta tag block.
Microsoft is also trimming the metadata available in the page source and has provided a table of changes affecting KB numbers, release dates, latest updated details, Windows versions the article applies to, Item header and locale details.
