Michael Slade

The latest thing that I am working on at work is a best practices document for one of our products. This document will ship with the next release of the product. This got me to thinking. Best practices are the best ways to design, install, deploy, configure, and maintain an application for optimum performance. I look at this as this is the way the product was intended to be run. The old saying “when all else fails, read the directions” comes to mind. Aren’t best practices the directions that should be followed? Microsoft has a lot of best practices books (see http://shop.microsoft.com/practices/ and http://www.microsoft.com/resources/practices/). If my company includes a best practices document with their product, shouldn’t Microsoft? I think customer satisfaction would increase immensely if Microsoft included the best practices documents when a product ships.