Council Spotlight: The impact of the portals

Hi everyone !

 

Today I am writing a small post about the use of portals and how the council tries to evangelize their use. I will explain how the portals can serve us and why they exist!

Currently, on the home page of the wiki, there are eight portals linked from there..

Wiki: Technologies Portal

Wiki: Platforms Portal

Wiki: Virtualization Portal

Wiki: Troubleshooting Portal

Wiki: IT Security Portal

Wiki: Development Portal

Wiki: Cloud Portal

Wiki: Management Portal

 

Each portal has a simple use, it allows us to easily find an article. You can search with the tag cloud too, but on the other hand, the portals are great if you want a quick way to check if a specific article has already been written before you write it... then a portal is right there to help you!

 

For me, I initially started to update the portals because in the past I wanted to write an article about Exchange 2013, but searching with the tag cloud took me almost 30 minutes to find that no one wrote an article like that yet. So yes, a simple "Exchange 2013 Portal" would have helped me check quickly and directly.

 

A portal allows all articles to be found; an article that can't be found is not a good thing!

 

The last point that made me use the portals so much is the fact that I found that some articles that were written for earlier version products, but they can still fit for the new product. An example is a PowerShell tip for Exchange 2007. It can run on Exchange 2010 & Exchange 2013... So updating the original's article tag and linking it from the 3 product portals (2007, 2010, and 2013) make the article much easier to find!

 

And my last point... I want to give a great thanks to Richard Mueller, because he helped me drive this council's task! :)

 

The key point of my post is simple!! If you're writing an article for a technology, then link to it from a portal so that it can be easily found!!! :)

 

Thanks everyone !

 

 

Regards,

 

Philippe

French Wiki Ninja