Sysinternals Site Migration

Hi, my name is Otto Helweg and I’m very excited to help lead the Sysinternals community migration as well as help define a plan for Sysinternals growth going forward. I’m a Program Manager in the Windows Server and Tools division but my background is heavy IT-Pro (not too much dev) and I look forward to interfacing with the Sysinternals users. Mark has been super helpful in guiding our planning for this migration and will continue to be involved in the post migrated site and ongoing development of its content.

 

Our goal is to smoothly migrate the major Sysinternals site components to Microsoft services and keep the same level of service the community received pre-acquisition. Here’s how the components are going to match up:

 

Original Sysinternals Site

Microsoft Service

Mark’s Blog

TechNet Blog - Mark

Yahoo Groups Newsletter

TechNet Blog – Sysinternals

Web Site

TechNet TechCenter

Downloads

Microsoft.Com Downloads

Forum

TechNet Forum

Source Code

Not being migrated.

 

Once the Sysinternals site has been completely migrated and stabilized, we’re going to begin to implement plans on growing this community. What does that mean? Well, we’ve just starting thinking about this but we do know that Sysinternals has been very successful in reaching their customer base with free tools and utilities that assist in Windows troubleshooting. We would like to see if we could leverage this model across other parts of Microsoft as well. Look for more details after the first of the year.

 

Let me highlight the Sysinternals site components that will change – just so there are no surprises.

 

Mark’s Blog: Mark’s blog has been moved over to TechNet blogs. He will continue to post on the same topics as before (as time permits I’m sure). We will work on getting his blog history moved over as well (although we’re still trying to determine the feasibility of migrating the blog comments). His new blog is: https://blogs.technet.com/MarkRussinovich

 

Newsletter: Going forward, we will be publishing the newsletter in the form of a blog. We feel a blog would be better since it can still be syndicated (trough RSS or ATOM) and it allows for folks to comment. This blog content will be primarily focused on site changes and updates during and post migration. The site blog is: https://blogs.technet.com/sysinternals

 

Web Site: Starting out we are going to be creating a TechCenter on the TechNet site dedicated to Sysinternals and containing the main Sysinternals pages. If we miss migrating important sections of the original Sysinternals site, we will migrate those after the fact as demand surfaces. We will initially maintain a site support e-mail address (syssite@microsoft.com) to address initial site issues.

 

Downloads: We will be migrating most Sysinternals tools to Microsoft.Com Downloads which has additional bandwidth for a better end-user experience. At Mark’s direction, we are not going to be migrating 100% of the tools for one of the following reasons:

 

1. It only worked on Win9x or DOS – the number of downloads didn’t justify the migration. These were eventually going to be removed from Sysinternals anyway.

2. Not compatible with XP or Vista – or had compatibility issues with other 3rd party applications and were slated for removal pre-acquisition.

3. Demo tools – some tools were posted as demos that were paired with Mark’s articles. We are still trying to determine where these will land.

 

If you want a tool back, let us know and we'll let community demand help drive our priorities.

 

We have also changed the Licensing Terms and made it ‘click-through’. The Licensing Terms are actually more liberal and are intended to allow the tools to be used in more situations without a custom license.

 

Forum: The Forum will be the last site component to migrate due to its complexity. The new TechNet Forum for Sysinternals will essentially have the same structure. In addition, the moderators have agreed to keep their roles as moderators in TechNet as well! We are going to try to migrate all the Forums history, but we know that data quality will suffer to some degree (e.g. reference links within replies may be broken). In addition we won’t be able to migrate Forum accounts, so participants will need to re-register with TechNet.

 

Source Code: The number of source code downloads didn’t justify the migration, support, and possible integration problems it might cause with other Windows components down the road.