• Illustration: Customized Premier Support View

Premier Online, a support portal for Microsoft customers who have Premier Support agreements, can now be customized to give corporate IT professionals quick access to support issues related to the products they actually use. The site will also offer better collaboration between customers and Microsoft technical account managers (TAMs) and will incorporate relevant information from not only the Microsoft technical support Knowledge Base (KB), but from TechNet and the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) as well.

Feature Overview

Key additions to Premier Online include the following:

• Access to the full partner KB, a superset of the KB articles available to the general public that includes articles restricted to high-level partners or that have not yet been released for public use
• A filtering mechanism that limits searches, bulletins, and alerts to those relevant to the products actually used in the customer's enterprise; the filter can be further refined by each user to include only a subset of the enterprise's software, or to add unlicensed products such as evaluation or beta versions
• A tabbed interface that helps customers quickly identify key bulletins, hotfixes, and training opportunities from Microsoft
• Collaboration features (still in the design stage) that will simplify communication between customers and their TAMs, and that let an organization's IT support staff collect all KB articles, incident reports, troubleshooting tools, and other resources in one place for easy review by the customer or by Microsoft.

Like its predecessors, the site also gives Premier customers access to hotfixes not available to the general public, and to tracking information on support incidents they have submitted.

Enterprise, Troubleshooting, Deployment Tabs

The Premier Online portal sports a tabbed interface that segments support issues into major categories. Each tab is populated with panes that highlight a handful of top or recent items, with a "more" link that expands the pane into a full page with further information.

Enterprise. Panes on the Enterprise tab highlight important messages from Microsoft about Premier Support itself, top issues related to the customer's software, recent security bulletins that affect the customer's software, a list of recent support incidents submitted to Microsoft, and training opportunities (such as Webcasts) related to the customer's Microsoft software.

Troubleshooting. Panes in the Troubleshooting tab highlight known problems, important KB articles, troubleshooting tools available to Premier Support customers, recent hotfixes, best practices for troubleshooting, and service packs.

Deployment. The Deployment panes highlight general deployment articles from MSDN, Microsoft partners, and other sources, including how-to articles related to deployment, technical deployment information, and best practices in deployment.

Configurable Filters, Privileges

One of the most important updates to the Premier Online portal is the ability to limit technical support information to the specific subset of products that the customer owns. An organization that uses Exchange Server but not BizTalk Server, for example, will see bulletins, hotfixes, and other information related to the former, but not to the latter. (For an example of a "filtered" view, see the illustration "Customized Premier Support View".) Searches of the KB will return documents relating only to software that a customer has selected.

The customer's main support contact, referred to by Microsoft as a customer service manager (CSM), sets up the initial list of products used in the enterprise. New user accounts created by the CSM will get that list of products by default, although these users can create their own lists as well. A database expert, for example, might want to limit the list of products to SQL Server and related products, ignoring Office and Exchange. This ensures that notifications and alerts related to SQL Server will be prominently displayed in that user's version of the Premier Online portal.

Users can also define a time frame, such as the previous week, for which any additions to the support portal, such as new security bulletins or hotfixes, will be flagged (with a small green flag next to the item) as new. This makes it easier for a support professional to spot the most recent information on the support portal.

Other Features

The Premier Online portal uses a more comprehensive collection of KB articles than those available to general users of Microsoft's Web-based help. Known as the Partner Knowledge Base, it contains articles prepared by Microsoft staff or partners such as the following:

• Descriptions of newly discovered vulnerabilities, problems, or workarounds that have not yet been published publicly
• Explanations of highly technical fixes, such as Registry edits, that should only be performed by IT professionals
• Articles about beta software, for which Microsoft does not offer public support.

Another useful feature for customers who purchase Software Assurance (SA) license upgrade rights, which include additional support benefits, is the ability to submit an incident and charge it to the customer's SA benefits rather than to their Premier Support contract. Many Premier Support customers don't take advantage of the support benefits they have gained with SA, often because they are unaware of those benefits or because it is too difficult to locate the licensing data and other identifying information that they need to get support under SA. The new Premier Online portal encourages them to take advantage of their SA benefits—and to purchase SA to get those benefits.

Future Plans

The improvements described above were important enough that Microsoft elected to roll them out before implementing the full set of new features requested by Premier Support customers, but the company says further enhancements are in the works.

Currently, the Enterprise tab simply offers a phone number that Premier Support customers can call to contact the company. In the future, this pane will expand into a subsite in which a TAM can highlight specific support issues or training opportunities, or can post customer-specific hotfixes, such as those provided for customers under custom support contracts. (For a description of new custom support services, see "Support Life Cycle Extended for NT, Exchange 5.5".)

"Research buckets" are another planned feature. Support personnel within an organization will be able to collaborate online to isolate and identify problems, collect relevant notes and articles, and share them with others in their organization or with their Microsoft TAM. The customer will be able to submit the contents of a research bucket along with a support incident, providing Microsoft with insight into the problem, the efforts the customer has already taken to resolve it, and information from other sources that seems relevant to the problem.

Resources

Microsoft Premier Online is available only to customers who have Premier Support agreements. Premier Support and other support offerings are described at support.microsoft.com.

Microsoft's support offerings were described in "Microsoft's Support Offerings" on page 26 of the Nov. 2004 Update.

Microsoft's support organization is described in "Understanding Microsoft's Worldwide Support Organizatio" on page 31 of the Oct. 2004 Update.

Improvements to Microsoft's public support Web site, available to all customers, were described in "Support, Licensing Web Sites Updated" on page 31 of the Dec. 2004 Update.

Software Assurance support benefits were described in "Software Assurance Improved" on page 24 of the July 2003 Update.