What is the MSN MCOPS Team?
MSN MCOPS (pronounced “McOps”) stands for MSN Money Central Operations. The MCOPS team handles the back-end web and SQL servers for MSN Money, the acclaimed financial website of the MSN network. This team serves as second and third-tier technical support in the event of technical difficulties or outages. They also set up or switch out servers related to the website.
What type of information did you document?
The articles I wrote gave technical information for anything ranging from the setup of a server to a work-around for a common server problem. These articles were used by the MCOPS team, so they were specific to the technology that they handle.
What were your duties? When I arrived, any support documentation the team used was spread out over over 40 word documents and several emails. These documents were “co-authored” by several different developers and server technicians, many of whom had either moved on to other teams, or who no longer worked for the company. My job was to make sense of the existing documentation, clear up missing holes, remove out-dated information, coalesce what was left, and publish this information using a new knowledge base system set up specifically for the MCOPS team. Articles were published using Interpress 4.0, a Microsoft internal publishing tool that creates articles in HTML and publishes it to a devoted internal web server.
This new system offers many advantages, namely a centralized location for all knowledge related to the website. It also offers an easy way for any employee to dynamically update the information to reflect changing conditions or environments. All that’s needed to compose or view an article is a web browser.
I created most of the articles using FrontPage, as Interpress would not allow editing of the HTML, and I wanted full control of textual format. Furthermore, I created a tool that allowed my manager to track my progress and set milestones.
I also went beyond my normal duties when I created a PowerPoint presentation on KB article creation. Using my presentation, I gave training for other MSN Money employees on how to create articles using the new Interpress knowledge base publishing application.
By the completion of my assignment, all documents and emails had been properly converted to the new knowledge base system, and the old documentation was ready to be archived. My manager, Heather Currie, was very pleased.