Microsoft Community Solutions

Microsoft has started a new section of their Knowledge Base called the Microsoft Community Solutions. These are KB articles that are written by Microsoft MVPs to help people conquer problems they face. This is ment to be much more formal than, say, a blog entry, because the article is immediately indexed by their KB engine, and comes up in KB search results.

Submitting an article is really cool.... you get a bunch of InfoPath templates to work with, and the end product is an XML document. You upload the doc file directly into Microsoft's system, and it goes live within a few hours.

The process still needs a bit of work, IMO. Because many of the MVPs are from other countries, sometimes you can tell when English was not someone's primary language. Some of them were kind of hard for me to read. I think there should be a review process to ensure consistency with grammar, formatting, etc. We'll see where that goes.

At any rate, my first KB article, HOWTO: Enable DTC Between Web Servers and SQL Servers Running Windows Server 2003 is online. This KB article came from several blog entries about my frustrations with getting two webservers on separate IP subnets and therefore separate workgroups to participate in transactions. I combined a couple existing KB articles and some extra security tips into a single walkthrough. The formatting on Step Three: Part Two did not get parsed correctly, but I have a note to have MS fix that. The <br> tags did not get parsed properly for some reason.

Microsoft did a great job with these Community Solutions. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.