Tl;dr – The Office 365 MODG is going away and the content is moving from TechNet (here and here) to Support.office.com (here), prepare to update your bookmarks appropriately (no auto-redirection).
Key Dates: New content available beginning March 2015, decommission starts in April 2015.
Over the next few months the remaining sections in the old Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Guide (MODG), primarily networking/performance, identity, & migration, will be decommissioned and our deployment guidance will be made available from support.office.com. There are a few other miscellaneous areas that will be moved to other locations or decommissioned in favor of better articles that already exist on support.office.com or MSDN. We’ll be undertaking the move in waves starting with networking/performance and Identity, followed by migration, and finally any remaining stragglers.
Transition Method
We understand that many of you have bookmarks, documentation, and other means of storing the location of key articles. So let me explain the method of our migration.
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We will not be able to automatically redirect your browser from the old TechNet article to the new Support.Office.com article.
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If you are using one of our FWLinks, those will be redirected.
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We will put notes at the top of all articles with a link to the new location at least one month before we begin removing content.
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After a note with the link to the new location has been live for a month the body of the article will be removed (leaving the link at the top).
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After the body has been empty for at least a month, we’ll remove the node from the TOC making the article disappear forever.
Here are some more details about the sections we’ll be moving…
Networking/Performance Content
Some of you have become acquainted with our new performance tuning page http://aka.ms/tune. The format looks ok on TechNet… but it really stands out on support.office.com (you’ll have to trust me on this one for now). We’ve staged all of our networking and performance content on the new support.office.com website and will be re-directing customers in the next few weeks.
If you’ve been going to https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852551.aspx for your networking content, you should start going to http://aka.ms/tune. We’ll leave pointers on TechNet to the new articles for a while, but suggest you start updating your bookmarks and telling your customers to use the tuning page.
Beginning in March you’ll see links to the new articles on support.office.com. One month later the content will be removed leaving only the link intact.
Identity Content
There have been a lot of changes happening lately when it comes to identity content. We have identity content here and here. We’ll be moving it all to here.
Beginning in March you’ll see links to the new articles on support.office.com. One month later the content will be removed leaving only the link intact.
Migration Content
We don’t have a lot of migration content in the MODG, there are some references here and here. The main thing that we’ll be moving though is the content from the Exchange Online section of TechNet, this one here. The migration content page design is still being worked out, so it will be linked up with the other sections, I just don’t have as detailed of a description yet.
Beginning in April you’ll see links to the new articles on support.office.com. One month later the content will be removed leaving only the link intact.
Misc. other & MODG TOC
All the other content in the MODG TOC will either be integrated with existing topics, removed in favor of a better topic or moved to some other location on TechNet.
Beginning in May you’ll see links to the new articles for everything else. One month later the content will be removed leaving only the link intact.
Final Removal
Beginning in June you’ll see the networking, identity, and migration content & TOC removed. All other TOCs and content in the MODG will be removed by the end of June.
That’s it, that’s the whole plan – yeah we have a lot of other work going on in the background to track articles, make sure we don’t leave off any best practices, and so on. The basics of the plan are simple though.
Until later,
Henrik Walther