One of the new features is the sidebar gadgets. I haven't seen them before, so I went to the Microsoft site to learn more about them. First I found marketing hype about how great they are, then I found http://vista.gallery.microsoft.com/vista/SideBar.aspx?mkt=en-nz. This page has downloads and links to information but all the links are to a "live.com" website. That site looks like some sort of social network / shareware distribution site.
So I called Microsoft to find out where the documentation is and after a long conversation with the support analyst the best they could refer me to was end-user documentation. I explained that I am an IT professional and I need to know how to manage them in a corporate environment, to which they responded that I should search for some third party websites that have more information and suggestions how to tinker with the gadgets. So I explained again that I am an IT professional and I don't want to tinker with gadgets, I want to manage corporate desktops professionally. The analyst went away to search again and finally came back to say that the end user help pages is all the documentation that Microsoft has to offer and if I wanted more I would have to go to a third party.
So, after all these years, the best desktop Microsoft has to offer is, from a corporate management perspective, undocumented. It gives me a sinking feeling.
But wait... After much searching about the Microsoft link and following links here there and everywhere, I finally found a page that has some reasonably technical information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-nz/library/aa965850(en-us,VS.85).aspx
And another Microsoft page for those who want to tinker with gadgets
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163370.aspx
And another Microsoft page for those who want to tinker with gadgets
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163370.aspx
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