Now that Exchange 2007 is formally launched, the documentation train keeps on rolling. Fresh off the presses, Microsoft gives us the following goodies:
I have to admit, I'm finding the redesign of the Microsoft Exchange Server TechCenter to be a lot less helpful than the previous Microsoft Exchange Technical Library (now defunct). This design is great if you want to get into the actual hyperlinked documentation that comes with the product (in the form of a Help file). It's not so great at allowing me to quickly determine if new whitepapers or guides have been released and figure out whether they are online or downloadable. The Technical Library format, on the other hand, gave a nice listing of the various guidance that was out there. With the wealth of information that came out for Exchange 2003 over the years, I'm sure that list got somewhat cramped and ugly to manage (especially where many papers were listed in multiple categories), but it still gave us the ability to see what guidance was available.
With the TechNet format, I still haven't been able to find links to some of the recently released documents; I just now found that most (but not all) of the documents I linked to above can be found by clicking the browse all Exchange Server 2007 documentation link, then navigating to the TechNet Library, Microsoft Exchange Server, Exchange Server Technical Articles, Connecting with Exchange Server 2007 node in the tree in the right-hand navigation pane. Not exactly intuitive. And where are the four deployment guide I linked to last time, or the two whitepapers in the links above? It's going to cause real pain if the best answer turns out to be "go browse through Microsoft Downloads for Exchange 2007 downloads" because they, in turn, don't give me an option to control the paging size and minimize page reloads. Some of us out here aren't afraid of scrolling.
If anyone from the Exchange team (or TechNet) is reading, please find some reasonable way to give us centralized, direct links to all of guides and papers.
On the other hand, one thing that I would really like to praise TechNet for: shorter URLs for the articles! This is a huge deal for those of us who write about Exchange, whether in blogs, whitepapers, books, or other formats. Thanks!