Some Books Online topics return "Topic is no Longer Available on MSDN/TechNet

Question

This post explains why some links to BOL topics return the message “Topic Is No Longer Available” on MSDN and Technet and describes the options available to fix the issue.

Update:  We have published 301 redirects for the topics that return "Topic Is No Longer Available" as of Monday, May 21.  Topics should now appear as expected.  You may continue to get a "Topic Is No Longer Available" message for a short period of time while the pages are replicated to all of the MSDN servers.  If you continue to get this message after Tuesday, clear the topic from your browser cache and report back to this thread if the problem persists.

During the development of the SQL Server 2012 product documentation, the SQL Server documentation team implemented a project to both consolidate information in Books Online (BOL) and change the focus of BOL to a task-based reference library. Details of this project can be found at Books Online News. The results of this project are two-fold:

• Some topics that exist in earlier versions of Books Online are removed from SQL Server 2012 Books Online even if the content is still relevant to SQL Server 2012.  For example, architectural topics such as the Pages and Extents Architecture topics are not included in 2012 BOL because they do not meet the new definition of BOL.  
• Some content that was in one or more small topics is now combined into a single, larger topic and the small topics were removed.  For example, much of the content that is contained in the 4 topics under this DML Trigger topic in SQL Server 2008R2 can now be found in a single DML Trigger topic in the 2012 BOL.  

The topics that were removed from the 2012 BOL as the result of this removal/consolidation effort were deleted from MSDN and TechNet on May 7 2012.   Due to unforeseen circumstances, searching for these topics currently returns only a “Topic Is No Longer Available”  page even though there are other valid versions of the topic available on MSDN and TechNet.  This is occurring regardless of whether the search is done through a search engine such as Bing or Google, or by searching directly in the MSDN library.   We are working with our MSDN team to understand the cause and corrective action to this behavior. 

The short-term solution is to add specific version information to the URL. For example this Change Tracking topic http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280519.aspx can be modified to point to the SQL Server 2008 R2 topic by adding (SQL.105) to the URL as shown here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280519(SQL.105).aspx.   The version options are:

• (SQL.105)  for SQL Server 2008 R2
• (SQL.100)  for SQL Server 2008
• (SQL.90)  for SQL Server 2005

This issue also impacts exteral links to these topics from sources such as KB articles,  blogs and forum posts.  These links will return a “Topic Is No Longer Available” message even though the topic is available in an earlier version of Books Online.   We are investigating possible solutions to correcting this behavior.   You can implement the short-term solution described above as appropriate.

We apologize for the inconvenience.  I will update this thread when I have additional information. 

Regards,

Gail

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Gail Erickson [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

Answer 1

Hi Gail,

Thanks for sharing this. :-)

Regards,

James