I’ve had similar experiences with Microsoft’s documentation. My memory is fuzzy but one instance I can recall the documentation was clearly what was meant to be in the final product but most definitely was not what shipped. To make matters worse the docs as they were would often result in a configuration that worked on the first sync but subsequently failed or even caused the service to reach a permanent state of limbo where it could never finish starting. This left a lot of people thinking things were broken for other reasons.
They took ages to for them to finally update the pages. In fact it took a well known consultant, one of their mvps, writing not just documentation that worked, but also thorough instructions on how to fix the predicament Microsoft got you in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team writing the docs were completely lost until they read his blog. The service was just one component but it was ridiculously complex for what it did. Sometimes I wonder if they crammed the service (Forefront Identity Manager) in to save the team working on it since they cancelled the standalone version of it.
Their docs can be good and are certainly improving but it does still feel like disjointed teams doing their own thing sometimes.
My assumption on this site is that most people talk from the perspective of devs. So I assume your experience with Microsoft's documentation is also on the dev side of things. I can't speak to that, I'm a sys admin so I have a different experience. And my job has me approaching technology from the opposite end. From what I have seen, Microsoft's is generally pretty good. Not the best but definitely far from the worst.
I’m afraid not. Those docs would have been used by both sides, especially for non-prod environments but they were definitely operations oriented.
I would agree they’re usually good but when they were bad, they were real bad. And bad seemed to happen a lot more outside of the “big” internal fiefdoms at the time (Desktop, Server, AD, Exchange, etc.).
They did seem to hit a rough patch during the transition but the only thing I’ve seen is gaps here and there due to what I assume is incongruity between teams. Like tools being moved from an installer and therefore the installer docs but corresponding docs for how to get those tools not being created/updated elsewhere.
They took ages to for them to finally update the pages. In fact it took a well known consultant, one of their mvps, writing not just documentation that worked, but also thorough instructions on how to fix the predicament Microsoft got you in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team writing the docs were completely lost until they read his blog. The service was just one component but it was ridiculously complex for what it did. Sometimes I wonder if they crammed the service (Forefront Identity Manager) in to save the team working on it since they cancelled the standalone version of it.
Their docs can be good and are certainly improving but it does still feel like disjointed teams doing their own thing sometimes.