William Keener

New Bing template for instant answers with Microsoft support troubleshooters

William Keener — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 08:37:00 GMT

A quick update on Bing technical instant answers that contain links to our automated solutions (support troubleshooters): To improve the experience with this type of instant answer, Bing is in the process of updating their template to display a "Run troubleshooter" button. This template change should make it easier to identify the troubleshooter link and more obvious that you need to download and run it. To see the new template on Bing.com (it may take a few days to be available for everyone), search for "OneDrive troubleshooter."

Here are a few additional sample queries for instant answers with links to our technical support troubleshooters:

Got feedback? If you have any feedback on this new feature, or if there are areas where you think we can do better, please post a comment here or via Twitter @Bing:

Tweet to @Bing

Microsoft Support Diagnostics Self-Help (Part II)

William Keener — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:35:00 GMT

In my last post on the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Self-Help Portal, I talked about the most common scenario of downloading and running the diagnostics on the computer that is having problems. In this post, I want to mention two other scenarios that may interest some of you.

Scenario 1: Create a session but send the diagnostic package to someone else to run

Suppose you work for a HelpDesk or another support organization and want one of your customers to run a diagnostic package so you can see the results. In this case, you can simply click Share instead of Download after you create a new diagnostic session on the portal. You can then copy the link and share it with your customer.

After they run the package and send the results to Microsoft, you can go back to the portal and view the online results, or download the offline results, from the Recent Sessions tab. To view the online results (if available), just click the name of the diagnostic package ("Baseline Reports Diagnostic Package" in this case). To view the offline results, click Download to download the CAB file. Then follow steps 12 and 13 in my previous post to extract the CAB and open the ResultsReport.xml file in Internet Explorer.

Scenario 2: Download a package that you can run on another computer (offline)

If you need to download a package that you can run on another (perhaps offline) computer, just download and run the package and select the Save to run later on another PC option. This will create a Portable_Diagnostic.exe that includes any dependencies so you can run it on another computer even if it isn't connected to the Internet. Of course, you will only have offline results in this case if the results are not sent to Microsoft.

Report a tech support scam to Microsoft

William Keener — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 13:50:00 GMT

Scammers have been around for a while now pushing rogue security software through email messages and fake websites, but as Kirsten Kliphouse pointed out last May they've also starting calling users on the phone and posing as technical support for a reputable company (such as Microsoft) in order to try to defraud users out of money or for other nefarious purposes. And as with any good con artist they often know something about the person they are calling, and their pitch can sound very convincing and scary. So please remember to be careful and skeptical. If you have had a suspicious or phony support experience, Microsoft would like to hear about it so we can work with law enforcement to put a stop to these scams and bring the perpetrators to justice. Another team in my group has released a web form that you can use to report a tech support scam to Microsoft to help us catch these cybercriminals. The form is here: Report a technical support scam to Microsoft https://support.microsoft.com/reportascam You can submit the report anonymously or provide contact information (in Question 10) if we can contact you if we have questions. Either way, it's a great way to go on the offensive. For more information about how Microsoft is taking action against these scammers, see this blog post by Courtney Gregoire (Senior Attorney, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit) about a civil lawsuit Microsoft recently filed in federal court in the Central District of California against Omnitech Support and related entities for unfair and deceptive business practices and trademark infringement. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfpWrbIPPrI[/embed]

Looking for some automated help to troubleshoot a complex issue?

William Keener — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:32:00 GMT

Last year we released a new version of our self-help automated troubleshooting service to replace Fix it Center Pro (FICP) - which replaced the older MPSReport tool that was used by Microsoft Support to collect diagnostic data from customers who opened a support incident. Like FICP this new service not only automates the collection of diagnostics data for you, but it also analyzes the collected data and automatically identifies root causes for known problems using pattern recognition, call stack analysis, and problem signature detection logic that is maintained by Microsoft's support engineers. For any known problems that are detected the service also notifies you about any available solutions, which could be in the form of a product update, a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article, or an automated fix or troubleshooter from Microsoft Support. While the service is intended primarily for advanced users and IT Professionals, it can be used by anyone.

This is the first in a series of posts I am planning to provide you with more information about this service and how to use it. First, the basics.

To use the automated troubleshooting service to diagnose problems with a server or desktop computer in your environment:

Open the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Self-Help Portal on the affected computer and sign in with your Microsoft (Live) ID (so you can track your sessions and receive email notifications when the analysis results are available).
You can search or browse through the list of available diagnostic packages to identify the package that you need. The "Learn More" link for each package that will open the associated KB article that explains more about the package and what data will be collected.
Click the title of the diagnostic and then click Create to create a diagnostic session. You can also enter a tracking ID (or just make one up) to help you keep track of the session.
Click Download to download the package to your computer.
Run the package and select "this PC" to run the diagnostics on your computer.
Accept the license agreement:
Click Yes on the User Account Control dialog (if prompted), and then click Start.
Wait for the diagnostic data collection to complete.
Click Next after reviewing the list of files collected.
Click Save a copy to save the results locally (in a CAB file) so you can review the collected data yourself or view an offline report. Then click Send to submit the collected results to Microsoft for automated analysis.
After the upload completes, click Close to exit the wizard.
Open the folder where you saved the results in step 10 and then extract the contents of the CAB file.
Note To extract the content of the cab file to a subfolder named "files", type the following at a Command Prompt in the folder that contains your saved CAB file.
expand Results_MachineName_Date.cab -F:* .\files
To view the offline results, open the "files" subfolder created in step 12 and then open the ResultsReport.xml file in Internet Explorer (click Yes to run scripts on the page and then click Allow blocked content). The report includes a list of issues checked, whether the issue was present, and any available solutions.
You should receive an email message when the analysis are complete for the results sent to Microsoft. This can take a few minutes to an hour or more, depending on the volume. To review the additional results online open the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Self-Help Portal again, and then click Recent Sessions.
Click the name of your session to view the online analysis results, and then click to expand the messages to see the details about problems detected and solutions available.

You can also send us feedback by voting on whether the messages and overall session was helpful.

Using Bing for technical instant answers and automated solutions

William Keener — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 08:17:00 GMT

Bing has been providing factual instant answers (and translation instant answers) for some time now, but recently they added "technical" instant answers for questions about Microsoft products and technologies or technical support issues. My previous team built the content management system that our internal content delivery teams are now using to add technical instant answers to Bing. Here's an example technical instant answer for the "Cortana" search term:

Now that I'm working on support diagnostics and automated solutions again, I have been working with the Bing and content delivery teams to get some instant answers created with links to some of our automated solutions.

And I'm happy to announce that the first one is live! So you can now search for "Windows Update Troubleshooter" (or a variety of related terms and error messages) and the first result will be a technical instant answer with a link to download and run our automated troubleshooter to fix problems with Windows Update.

When you click the link in step 3, you will be prompted to open (or run) or save the troubleshooter.

Just click Open (or Run) to launch the troubleshooter.

The content delivery teams will be constantly adding more technical instant answers, and we hope to have more live with automated solutions soon!

Note that technical instant answers are also available in the Bing app on Windows Phone. To see the phone experience, tap Search and then type or say "cortana" on your Windows Phone. Then click the "See More" link at the bottom of the second result (after the ad - "Meet Cortana on Windows Phone 8.1") and swipe left or right to view the content on each of the tabs.

I'm back!

William Keener — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 07:22:20 GMT

Did anybody miss me? :)

After a long hiatus from this blog I'm planning to start posting here again. For the past few years I have been working on Microsoft internal content and knowledge management systems, including a KCS verified knowledge management system used to manage the Knowledge Base. Now I'm working on support and self-help diagnostics and automated solutions again. I'm excited to be back in this space, and I'm looking forward to updating you on some of the new customer-facing stuff we're working on. So watch this space for more information (coming soon)...

Big Facebook announcement

William Keener — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:34:00 GMT

Facebook is apparently going to announce some major changes in a few minutes (1:00 PM ET).

Quoting Ben Parr, who saw a preview of the changes, "On Thursday, developers will be elated, users will be shellshocked and the competition will look ancient. On Thursday, Facebook will be reborn. Prepare yourselves for the evolution of social networking."

You can watch the announcement live here:

f8live on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Facebook Activity - Support.Microsoft.com

William Keener — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:37:00 GMT

Most interesting recent activity taking place for Support.Microsoft.com.

Become a Fan of The Microsoft Knowledge Base on Facebook

William Keener — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:01:00 GMT

The Microsoft Knowledge Base is now on Facebook. Are you a fan yet?

The Microsoft Knowledge Base on Facebook

Detecting browser and OS via JavaScript running in the Internet zone

William Keener — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:46:00 GMT

We're often asked how to detect the browser and OS versions via JavaScript running in the Intenet zone. Thanks to Jeremy, Forest, David, and a few other folks on my team for help with these samples. I previously posted a sample that parses the userAgent string and compares it to a finite set of regular expressions to map to a specific IE browser version (including IE8) and then hide content on the page that does not apply to the detected version. The sample below maps a finite set of specific OS and browser combinations to route users to a corresponding page. You will need to add parsing for "windows nt 6.1" for Windows 7.