Alerts for Microsoft Knowledgebase Articles
Yesterday I saw a link for https://kbalertz.com on https://www.asp.net; I had heard of kbalertz before but had never visited. Last night I went to the site and was very pleasantly surprised at the functionality of the site, including the total ease with which I could sign up for alerts by email on some of my favorite MS technologies like Infopath and Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). And then, being a big RSS fan, you can imagine my glee to find out that I could sign up for a feed of new KB articles (Infopath, WSS) -- I don't even have to get them in my email, I can just let Newsgator handle them. (And have I mentioned how great it is to be able to right click on one of those XML buttons and *poof*, I'm subscribed?) If you want to check out all of the MS technologies that you can sign up for alerts on, start here.
For you InfoPath fans (and I know you're out there, because I see the search terms in the logs!) this is really worth checking out because not only are there the standard KB articles, but there are also quite a few "How To" articles. I wish I would have found the one that talks about how to programatically submit an Infopath form to a Sharepoint Document Library before bumbling to the solution myself. It would have saved me a lot of time!
This morning when I checked my email, I discovered that they do the right thing and send all the new KB articles for the technologies you've selected in one email -- these guys are great. They have 113,070 KB summaries indexed, with more every day, and their full text search works really well. One of the bonuses for me last night, as I was cruising their site was that I found a potential answer to a niggling problem that I've been dealing with. I'm an administrator for our internal Sharepoint site, but there are a couple of things that I can't do, like rename a subweb, no matter how many times they add me to the administrator group. Frankly, I hadn't even thought to search the knowledge base for an answer, I thought it was human error. But this, that I noticed while cruising the Front Page 2003 articles, matches so closely that I'm thinking it's the solution.