Fix it — great idea!

If you’re hav­ing a prob­lem with a Microsoft product, then the first stop for find­ing a solu­tion pretty much needs to be the MS Know­ledge­base. It’s solved prob­lems for me and for cli­ents times without num­ber. Often how­ever this has involved print­ing out the art­icle in ques­tion in order to fol­low a series of steps on the com­puter with the problem.

A new, and very wel­come addi­tion to some art­icles on the Know­ledge­base removes the need for this — a “Fix it” but­ton, shown above, has been added. When this but­ton is avail­able, it will down­load a small file that con­tains a script or execut­able that per­forms all the steps for you. For example, if Inter­net Explorer is miss­ing from your desktop, the “Fix It” but­ton down­loads a small installer file con­tain­ing a script to put it back.

I can see this going far, and hope it’s a major change in fix deliv­ery. Help Desks in par­tic­u­lar should gear up to build local lib­rar­ies of these scrip­ted fixes, in order to push them out where required. And build­ing the server-specific fixes into Sys­tem Cen­ter Oper­a­tions Man­ager for auto­mated behind-the-scenes prob­lem res­ol­u­tion would be a great next step too.