Maintenance is scheduled to take place on Symantec's SymAccount authentication service for 12 hours* Saturday, January 22 beginning at 7:30 AM PST**.

Symantec's Connect community uses the SymAccount service to authenticate users to the community.

During this time,

• Anonymous users will be able to browse and search Connect content as usual.
• Users who logged in before the outage will remain authenticated and will be able to browse, search, and post content as usual.
• Users attempting to log in during the outage will be denied.
• Users attempting to set up a new account during the outage will be denied.

The SymAccount team is upgrading to a new infrastructure that should speed up the log in process significantly.

* We expect the upgrade to take less time than is allotted but, as is the case with all upgrades, issues may arise that could cause this outage to be longer than scheduled. If issues are encountered...

• Added code to the "Contact Us" form that will detect when a computer (spam bot) is filling out the form and will reject the submission.
• Added a "Userpoints audit tool" to help us troubleshoot the balances on the "Top Contributors" block.
• Added code that hides private nodes from the "solve this" list.
• Added an "Author" subtab to the Notifications tab on user profile pages to allow users to manage their subscriptions to authors.
• Fixed an issue where admins and editors were unable to change the community and product of an existing node to move it to a new (correct) community.
• Hid the point totals on the Trusted Advisors tab of the Top contributors block.
• Added translation links to all content types so users could navigate between translated versions of the same article.
• Resolved issue with images being served via http to authenticted (https) users.
• Resolved...

As mentioned earlier, we've been hard at work on a redesigned Symantec Connect.  You are now looking at the finished product.  We had four main goals for this new design:

1. Simplify navigation
2. Improve search
3. Clean up distractions
4. Help new users understand how the site works

Along the way we fixed dozens of bugs and make other smaller enhancements.  As always, this isn't the end of the road - we continue to make adjustments to Connect every week based on your feedback.  The video below will give you a quick overview of what's new.  We hope you like it.

What do you do if your computer freezes and restarting just won’t do the trick? Or if you click on a link that ends up being malicious? What if your hard drive crashes and none of your files are where they should be? If you’re anything like me—you call on your systems administrator who comes in to save the day.

Most administrators do much more than handle support-related requests. They keep entire data centers up and running, they recover and protect valuable customer data and keep systems up to date so that they are safe from malicious attacks and other causes of downtime. They manage an ever-increasing amount of data and storage resources that keeps growing and growing. They wear sweatshirts to work in July because of the cool environments in which they are forced to work.

Now think of where you and your business would be without good systems administrators. Valuable time, resources and frustration would be expended trying to resolve issues and...