Wiki Life: Docs.com is shutting down

It was announced on Friday June 9, 2017 that Docs.com is being shut down. The final day for the service is Friday, December 15, 2017. This is sad news since Docs.com was only converted from Curah! last year.

For the full end-of-service announcement, see the post here: Important information about Docs.com end of service. The article also includes a complete schedule of when services will be retired and instructions on how to move files and content from Docs.com.

Docs.com

Docs.com_logoDocs.com is part of the Office family and allows users to distribute their Office documents. Personal pages and deep analytics offer users a unique tool to share a variety of content.

The article states that with the purchase of the LinkedIn brand that its document sharing service SlideShare is now the natural spot to house Docs.com files. I use SlideShare for my conference presentation slides and I like its functionality.

If you do not want to move to SlideShare, other file storage and sharing platforms exist. Speaker Deck can share your slides. If you want to share files other than slides you can use a GitHub repo or you can add them to OneDrive, Dropbox or Box and share links from there.

If you need help to migrate your content, you can get help via https://aka.ms/docscom-support.

Curah!

CurahLogo

A lot of the initial Docs.com content was migrated over from Curah!. Curah! was a content curation platform launched by Microsoft in 2014. Curah! allowed people to generate their own articles and listicles of information. This could be used for sharing information with everyone and to help others find great content.

Curah! was a big hit with the TechNet Wiki community. There were multiple Wiki articles and about 21 Wiki Ninjas blog posts written about the service.

Summary

To be honest, the discontinuation of Docs.com was not a major shock and the move to SlideShare makes sense. Once Microsoft embraced open source documentation via GitHub I could see something like this happening. I talked about this movement of merging information and putting items under version control in an earlier blog post on this site: Treat docs like code.

I think we can expect more unification of sites in future as Microsoft leverages their brands and moves to create portals that offer a ‘single source of truth’.

by Ken Cenerelli (TwitterBlogMSDN ProfileMVP Profile)