Microsoft ILM community support resources
At present there are various community forums/newsgroups that you can use to get quality support for ILM 2007 and above. At present these consist of:
- the official “MIIS – TechNet Forum”
- the Yahoo user group “MMSUG”
- and the retired “MIIS/IIFP Newsgroup”
The MMSUG user group was founded in Sept 2000 when support was still given for MMS. The group later adopted to include MIIS and most recently ILM 2007 discussions. This group is loved by many because of it’s simple email based communications as well as it’s large membership (2800+). The one major drawback of this group is the fact that it is hosted on Yahoo Groups; as ILM 2007 is a Microsoft product…. (you figure it out). As a result of this no Microsoft product team member post to this forum.
Microsoft did however create it’s own newsgroup a few years ago as well, but this had some problems as well. The most frustrating problem with the old NNTP solution is that content is only kept for a few days (30 if I’m not mistaken). As such Microsoft launched the TechNet forums last year (with MIIS getting it’s own little spot). Advantages of the new forums include:
- Simple interface (No clients to configure / install)
- Microsoft product team interaction
- Searchable / indexed content (Google, MSN, Yahoo…they all turn up forum stuff in searches)
- Answer tagging. (To find related content)
- Persistent content. Information is kept for seven years—not 30 days.
- Passport authentication.
- Visual Studio 2005 integration.
- RSS feeds
One of the major points counting against the current MIIS TechNet forum is its lack of email integration (that MMSUG has), as such there are still members of the community the use MMSUG and the MIIS Newsgroup.
(Apart from these points several people get to these other mechanism through simple web search engine queries as well)
It is however the recommendation of Microsoft (and myself) that community member use the MIIS TechNet forums for you support questions. This gives you a way of interacting with skills MIIS MVP’s as well as the product team themselves (who regularly monitor the forum).
Apart from the various community forums there as also been quite a few interesting ILM related websites (from MVP’s of the community). Some of the most interesting ones are listed in my blog roll, but I would like to mention a few of them again:
- MIISExperts
- Craig Martin’s – Identity Trench
- Brad Turner’s – identitychaos.com
- Joe Stepongzi’s – microsoftidm.com
- Identity Management – Alex Tcherniakhovski
- Carol’s – MissMIIS
- Chris Calderon’s – IdentityJunkie.com
- David Lundell – ILM Best Practices
There are many other sites offering great ILM 2007 related reading, if you’d like to share some of these drop me a line at almeroATputtyqDOTcom.