Blog Post: New PartnerSource – Let’s start all over :(

This weekend, Microsoft apparently decided to migrate PartnerSource to a completely new platform – I was told: based on Sharepoint this time.. . And I hear you thinking: FINALLY. I definitely agree: something needed to be done. It wasn’t too easy to find stuff on PartnerSource, to not say: it was darn difficult.

And because it was difficult, many people in the Dynamics Community (and this time, I’m not only talking about the NAV community) were helping people their way, to guide them to really important information. For example, I have numerous (and I mean A LOT) blogposts where I refer to PartnerSource, like recently in the post about SEPA updates.

All these links, from the entire Dynamics Community, now have a dead link. All will fail. Dead. No endpoint. In fact, this is what happens when you click any link that refers to the old PartnerSource:

1. Your request is being redirected:
   

   
   

2. The page you requested cannot be found:
   

   
   

I can only assume that the intention was to redirect the “old” links to the new location on the new platform. Why else is it trying to do that .. . Well, there must have gone something wrong in the multiple test-steps and quality assurance at Microsoft, because that just doesn’t work, dudes! And I really hope that Microsoft can see the importance of it .. in my understanding, it affects the entire community. From feedback I get from lots of people, they use search engines to look for information, which NEVER ends up on PartnerSource, because that needs a login, in stead, it ALWAYS ends up on blogs, which refers to partnersource. Which means …

People will not find what they are looking for!

Another caveat, for all people that don’t live in the US (still think that’s the majority of the people… ) .. when you go to partnersource, you’ll end up on the North American page of PartnerSource. At least in my case, with my user account. It didn’t do that previously.. . So, when you click on this URL: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource, it will redirect it to: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/northamerica. Don’t exactly know if this has any negative effect in finding stuff .. but it doesn’t make sense afterall. I want to land on the European landing page.. and have all European related information.

No, Microsoft, you don’t get “thumbs up” from me this time … .

I added a poll on my blog.  If you have an opinion, please fill it out .. it would be interesting to see if I’m making a fuss about nothing or not..