Retiring OpsManJam

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Many of you may be familiar with OpsManJam which we have used for the last few years to deliver Operations Manager content such as sample management packs and whitepapers.  It has served us well for that time, and I’ve used it as my primary delivery vehicle for samples that I wanted to put out into the public.  As useful as it has been though, the time has come for us to retire it.

The primary reason that we created the site in the first place was because we did not have a suitable location to house content from the community.  Since the time it was created though, we have some great resources on TechNet designed specifically for this purpose.  We have the TechNet Wiki for providing technical documentation and other content, and we have the TechNet Gallery for providing downloads such as sample management packs.

The primary advantages of the TechNet sites over OpsManJam are as follows:

  • They are housed within the umbrella of TechNet which is Microsoft’s primary repository of technical information.  OpsManJam is an external site making it more difficult to locate and to link to related content.
  • Community members can freely contribute content.  With OpsManJam, no one can contribute content without going through an administrator of the site.
  • Community members can freely edit existing content on the TechNet Wiki.  With OpsManJam, no one can edit existing content.
  • The rating system in the Gallery and the point system for TechNet contributors allows users to assess the value of content.

So what do with the existing OpsManJam content? I’ve moved all of my MPAuthor sample management packs into the TechNet Gallery.  Just do a search for MPAuthor, and you should be able to find those.  I’ve also talked to other contributors about moving their contributions into the Gallery so we should see those show up.

The Featured Articles section has a variety of useful articles that different people have provided.  Ideally, that content would be moved into the TechNet Wiki, but that’s a significant amount of work.  Rather than try to do that, I zipped them all up into a single file and made it available in the TechNet Gallery. 

I’ve gone through other content that we have on the site, and it appears the majority of it is either out of date and/or hasn’t been significantly used.  We’re going to go ahead and retire that content along with the site.  If anyone knows of any content that you think we need to keep available, then please let me know.

I don’t have a specific date yet when we will pull the site offline, but I’ll announce when it goes  We’ll redirect the URL to an explanation to alleviate any confusion.  The current target is to have that completed by the end of the calendar year.

As always, please send a mail to MPAuthor@microsoft.com if you have any comments.

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Update 1/7/2013

OpsManJam is officially offline.  The URL will bring you to this blog entry.  Again, please send me a mail if there is any valuable content that we didn't account for.