For the love of all that is holy, publish timely, accurate, helpful documentation on your products and services!
I attended a "Security Seminar" at Microsoft's office yesterday, oddly, it was interesting. Lot's of sales pressure to be sure, interesting speakers (oddly), some interesting content (even more interesting), lunch was out-freaking-standing, but...the Evil Empire (my old Alma Mater, Microsoft) is suffering more and more each week with "...can't see the forest from the trees..." syndrome. In their rush to make everything "Azure Cloud Enabled" they are violating the 6"P's" of the Information Technology World, namely, their documentation sucks like a black hole!
Competent product documentation is expected for a company like yours, if you can't get the little things right, how can we trust you with the big stuff?
Learn to make your bed every morning dog gone it!
They could really take a lesson from US Navy Admiral McRaven's 2014 University of Texas commencement speech, made famous on Youtube, you are Microsoft for crying out loud, we expect you to do great things, but for the love of all that is Holy, do the little things right, but NO! Their product documentation really, really sucks, and the really sad part is that in the seminar yesterday, when I asked about this, they freely admitted it. They asked me to upload my documentation for them to plagiarize!
For the last few months, we've been working with Microsoft's new Data Loss Prevention [DLP] suite (a mix of some E3 and E5 level products) and they have very compelling capabilities, a rich Chinese Menu approach to DLP, somewhat difficult to explain to Engineering and Software Development Managers (we've got over twenty-five of them), but we've developed some cheat sheets, etc...to take the sting out of the Organizational Change Management [OCM] aspects of the adoption. The OCM aspects are by far the most difficult part of the implementation to date.
The big hurdles have been:
(1.) Finding relevant documentation.
If we could have found relevant documentation on the concepts, basic building blocks, product names (which seem to change almost daily), capabilities, etc...things would have gone so much more smoothly. I mean...really? The power of "scoped policies" in the Azure Information Protection blade, a total white wash in your documentation, a veritable King Kong powerhouse in reality.
(2.) "How To" articles that make no sense whatsoever.
You are not wanting for articles entitled, "blah, blah, blah deployment Roadmap...", if only it WAS a roadmap! Ninety-nine times out of one hundred it was just some engineers mental masturbation about how cool his dream is and how stupid you are for not sharing the dream and understanding his user experience to support his dream. An endless parade of embedded hyperlinks in the online documentation that takes you farther and farther down the rabbit hole and provides little to no value to the "roadmap" you are looking for in the first dang place!
I mean, now really, even Perry Clarke would have trouble figuring out how to enable AIP based outbound mail rules in this fine kettle of fish.
(3.) Blog articles that promise to be timely and relevant.
The best was the Information Security Blog article that talked about their fabulous new Tech Writer and his/her valiant efforts to bring things up to date and make them relevant. Nice idea, but, five months after the article, none of this has materialized. We used to joke that "...Microsoft has the worlds worst software and the worlds greatest marketing!...". It is no less true in 2017 that Microsoft still has the worlds best marketing (lord knows I got a refresher bombardment of marketing yesterday) and now they have the worlds worst product documentation.
Proud Moments to be certain.
RECOMMENDATION
Guys, take a breather like you did with your "...secure computing..." initiative and bring in a small army of Tech Writers, and make your Product Marketing Managers and Engineers work with them to provide we, your customers [you know, those annoying people that pay you?], with documentation worthy of the name "Microsoft", not shiny, not flashy, not "gameificationed" just helpful.
But you wont...
So, Microsoft guys and gals, if your still reading, go read this book, we, your frustrated and very technical customers will be glad you did:
Admiral McRaven's book on Amazon
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