How to Get The Most Out of Chocolatey Products & Services

Chocolatey Software has a plethora of information sources that provides you, our customers and community members, with answers to questions you may not have even thought of yet! With so many sources and so much information, the challenge can be: where do you start?

Today I will outline all the sources where you can find out more about Chocolatey, the company and the products, where to ask your questions and what options are available to you as a customer, or as a community member.

Reference Documentation

The first place to look at is our documentation site. Here you will find:

• Reference documentation for all Chocolatey Software products, including:
  • Chocolatey CLI.
  • Chocolatey Licensed Extension.
  • Chocolatey Central Management.
  • Chocolatey Agent.
  • Chocolatey GUI.
  • Chocolatey GUI Licensed Extension.
• Set up and how-to guides.
• Frequently asked questions.
• Rarely asked questions that are important to document.
• What is, and how to create packages for, the Chocolatey Community Repository including organizational use, excessive use, and rate limiting.

… and much more.

The documentation site is a comprehensive resource for all things Chocolatey. So much information, in fact, that it can be difficult to find what you are looking for. We are very conscious of that, so ensure you use the Search to help find what you are looking for.

Release Announcements

If you are looking to find out what we release, when we release it, then you have a few options open to you:

• chocolatey-announce Google Group.
• Chocolatey Blog. We only blog about the major Chocolatey product releases.
• We announce the releases on all our social media platforms, so make sure you’re following us.

You can always find the release notes for all Chocolatey products on our documentation site:

• Chocolatey CLI.
• Chocolatey Licensed Extension.
• Chocolatey Central Management.
• Chocolatey Agent.
• Chocolatey GUI.
• Chocolatey GUI Licensed Extension.

Chocolatey Blog

You know where the Chocolatey blog is, as you’re reading it right now! Our blog is where we announce releases, deep dive into features, talk about frequent use cases and so much more. If you want to know more about what is going on in the world of Chocolatey, our blog is a good place to start.

Commercial Customer Support

If you are a Chocolatey for Business customer you may have access to our Support and Solutions Team. We don’t just “answer tickets”, we raise internal and external issues, jump on virtual calls and work through your problem to get you a solution, gather feedback and advice for our Engineering Team, and do whatever is needed to provide each and every customer a “white glove” level of service backed by a Service Level Agreement.

You can also find help articles on our Chocolatey Help Center and find related issues raised by our team, or customers, in our Chocolatey Licensed Issues GitHub Repository If you still have questions, run choco support from the command line, to find out your other options.

If you are not a Chocolatey for Business customer, and you are intrigued as to how a company dedicated to the success of each, and every one, of their customers, becomes dedicated to your success, contact us.

Community Assistance

Whether you are a Chocolatey for Business customer, or not, every one of our customers and community members has access to our Community Assistance. While not backed by any Service Level Agreement, you will find the Chocolatey Team frequently responding to questions alongside our fantastic Community members.

To make accessing Community Assistance as easy as possible, we cover several different platforms:

• Discord.
• chocolatey Google Group: This is our longest running assistance area, using the traditional Google Groups email forum for questions and answers.
• Reddit. Established in 2013 it is one of the longest running subreddits.
• Both Chocolatey and Chocolatey Community GitHub Discussions.
• GitHub issues for Chocolatey CLI, Chocolatey GUI, Chocolatey Ansible and others.

Social Media

Chocolatey Software is tweeting, tooting, and posting where our customers and community are. We’re on all the social media things so come and join us by following.

Chocolatey Community Repository

While not a resource of information in the strictest sense, the Chocolatey Community Repository is the largest repository of Windows packages available. With, as of today’s date, 3.74 Billion downloads of the 10,767 unique packages and 252,579 package versions, there is a lot of blood, sweat and experience in those packages.

If you are creating packages, whether for the Chocolatey Community Repository or your own internal repository, learn from the experience of others and use the repository packages as a basis for your own.

Summary

Chocolatey Software provides our customers and community with a wide range of options to find out about our products, how to set up and configure them, get answers to questions, and best practices for creating and maintaining packages. You could argue there is too much information! I hope this blog post has alerted you to resource that you didn’t know existed, and encourages you to use those you did.

If you’re a customer, experience a level of service and support that so many other customers fail to provide. If you’re not a customer, you now know what you’re missing. Don’t let FOMO consume you.

We are always open to feedback on how we can do better. Let us know on one of the many channels above!