Earlier last month, the Exchange team blog turned seven. Our first post, creatively titled “First Post!!!” of the Microsoft Exchange team blog, was dated Feb 09, 2004.
From the squeaky lobster to the Exchange 2007 secret decoder ring, we’ve enjoyed sharing Exchange stories with you.
It has been an interesting journey, sharing technical tips and guidance, announcing product releases and updates, seeking community feedback, and sharing important moments in Exchange history and culture with you — the squeaky lobster stories, Exchange limerick contests, why an OOF's an OOF and not an OOO, the Autodiscover song and, from 'the edge of reason', the tale of the nuclear toaster man.
If you're missing Mercury, Platinum, and Ti, take a brief trip down the memory lane in A brief history of time - Exchange Server way.
In December 2004, we reached a million hits, a milestone for our new blog back then!
The EHLO Evolution
Over the years, we’ve received a lot of feedback about this blog. You’ve loved, liked, and appreciated our posts, and found them useful. Two common questions emerged from your feedback:
- Is this the official Exchange team blog? Is this really a Microsoft site?
- Is the content on this blog “authoritative”?
As we’ve said for years – we hear ya!
The Exchange team blog has moved to a new home on TechNet. The new url – blogs.technet.com/exchange, and the branding should answer the above two questions.
Exchange blog content is authoritative. Blog posts are written by Exchange product group members, including program managers, developers, testers, and experts from the support and field organizations. Technical posts go through a tech review by one or more subject matter experts. In some cases, the author himself/herself is the one with the most insight or knowledge of a component or feature that no additional tech review is required or possible. That is not to say that there can never be any mistakes. But we take quality of posts seriously and if there are problems - we work quickly to get them addressed.
Eventually, you’ll find a lot of the useful content published on the blog being incorporated in product documentation. The blog allows us to get important content to you quickly, share timely announcements and opinions, and more importantly, to continue the conversation with you and get your valuable feedback.
We’d like to draw your attention to some of the changes:
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URLs: One of the requirements for the move to TechNet was a seamless user experience for you. You can continue to access the blog using the msexchangeteam.com domain (and be automatically redirected to the new blog). We’ve ensured you can access previous posts using their old msexchangeteam.com URLs, so you can continue to use any links to previous posts. Older RSS feeds will also continue to work. You can also subscribe to the feed in both Atom and RSS formats from the shortcuts in the right column.
New posts, however, will not have an "old" URL associated with them, but can still be accessed through the old RSS feed.
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Design: We’re happy to bring a clean new look to the blog, which highlights blog posts and does away with the distractions. The blog home page allows you, the reader to choose if you want to see all content or an excerpted view of the post contents on the home page. Community and other links have been moved to the footer section at the bottom of the page.
We’re not quite done yet, so you’ll see incremental design changes and tweaks happen here.
To help you feel "right at home" on this new site, we kept our "You had me at EHLO" bubbles graphic, but we might look to update that in the future too. The bubbles graphic has been updated too, to include a major theme from our blog’s history. Can you spot it?
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Navigation: The navigation bar on top allows you to easily access the Library, which includes links to blog-related applications and downloads, scripts and files, videos and the Exchange Server TechNet Library, which is the home of Exchange documentation on TechNet. You can also easily access the Exchange wiki, which contains community-contributed content, and the Exchange TechCenter.
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Browse by tags: As you may have noticed, we now have a tag cloud on the right.
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Search: The search bar is a part of the navigation bar, always accessible. Since we’re now on TechNet, search results are served by TechNet, and offer rich search functionality, including the ability to subscribe to search results, and view search results sorted by relevance, ratings, time published, or alphabetically.
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Comments: Now that we’re on the TechNet blog platform, you can use your TechNet login (LiveID) to comment. If you visit and post in Exchange or other forums on TechNet, you can use the same account to post comments.
As always, we welcome your continuous feedback on blog posts, and blog ideas that you email us regularly via the "EHLO Idea"s alias. If you created an account with our previous blog site (something we never required) - you will still need to create one now, as we did not do any account/profile migration work.
We request you to keep blog comments relevant to the post. Although the blog team and post authors from the Exchange team try to answer most questions, many times we can’t respond to questions of a support nature which require more details about your deployment and infrastructure. For such questions, we must direct you to Exchange forums. You can also contact Microsoft Support for assisted support by email or phone. Links to Exchange forums can be found in the new navigation bar on top of this blog and also in the footer, along with links to Support.
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Sharing: On each post page, you will see links to share the post on Twitter, and the familiar Facebook Like button. At the bottom of the post, you’ll see a number of additional sharing options to share the post on social networking and sharing services such as Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn and more.
We hope you like the clean and simpler new look! It should also be quicker to load.
A Big Thank You From The Exchange Blog Team
To all contributors to the blog – thanks for sharing your knowledge, guidance, tips and opinions with the Exchange community. Keep the posts coming!
To fellow bloggers in the Exchange community – if you have an Exchange blog or web site, send us the details so we can add them to the Cool Community Links page.
To all our visitors - thanks for continuing to read, and above all – for the constant and relentless feedback. You help us continue to build the best messaging and collaboration platform in the world!
Tell us what you think about our new blog home!
Microsoft