| Microsoft Shuts Down TechNet Gallery |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Monday, 06 April 2020 |
|
Microsoft is shutting down TechNet Gallery, the website where TechNet members could share scripts, tools, and guides for use with Microsoft products. Microsoft shut down its TechNet subscriber service for new subscriptions back in 2013, at that point keeping the online TechNet blogs and customer support forums. Over recent years the blogs were shut down, and last year it closed the forums in favor of a new option called Microsoft Q&A. Now the gallery is going too.
TechNet used to represent one of the better aspects of Microsoft for IT professionals. The annual subscription fee of a couple of hundred dollars gave subscribers the right to download nearly all Microsoft’s desktop and server software, and install it for evaluation purposes, and the forums, blogs and gallery provided usable and understandable information on how the software actually worked rather than how Microsoft's less-than-wonderful documentation claimed it worked. Microsoft says that in the last ten years, the TechNet Gallery has hosted over 25,000 contributions from the community members and Most Valuable Professionals (MVP). The thinking behind closing it is that, in Microsoft's view, it's better to host small tools, scripts, and utilities alongside their source code, with transparent licensing and documentation in GitHub projects. They also believe that social media and tech blogs have become the primary way that people post and share tips and tools with one another, resulting in very low utilization of most of the content on the TechNet Gallery. However, there are a number of items on the Gallery that are very popular with over 100,000 downloads. Despite this, TechNet Gallery is now read-only, and will be closed in June 2020. At the moment you can't create new submissions, but you can edit existing ones. Microsoft is encouraging project owners to use the project description to point to the new location of their projects, as existing projects won't be archived on GitHub so the project creators need to do their own migration. Hopefully the Internet Archive will create a copy of the Gallery before it disappears, but if there's useful stuff you've relied on, you need to download it before June.
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 April 2020 ) |
