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Anandi’s Thoughts

Random stuff (mostly) about working as a Program Manager at Microsoft
Check out the Connect Blog

Our TAP customers are using the Connect website to submit their feedback and get program announcements, technical info, etc. You guys might be interested in checking out Corey's Connect Blog.  I don't know Corey personally (hazards of working for a huge company), but thought you'd want to read about the inner workings of the Connect project and provide feedback to him there.  Currently I've filed about 6 bugs and suggestions for that team based on input from my TAP customers.  Some of those things look like they will be fixed in the next version, which is pretty cool. 

As a program administrator, I'm very happy with the site.  It took almost no time to get up to speed on how to use it and there's a pretty helpful internal discussion list here with people who can answer my questions.  Also, their support team is *awesome* (special kudos to John and Lisa) and have been very responsive to any issues that have come up.  Plus, I'll get an opportunity to learn some T-SQL because I have to write some custom queries to get reports out of the survey data.  I'm just too picky to be satisfied with the existing ones.  :)

What are your thoughts about Connect?  How does it compare to Betaplace?

Posted: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 2:51 PM by anandi

Comments

Chris Bardon said:

I've never actaully used Betaplace, but I definitely have a couple of problems with Connect as an application for something like the TAP. As a platform for providing feedback for a product, it's not bad. Customers can enter bugs, and be notified of updates to their tickets. As a platform for community interaction though, where you have things like community-contributed workarounds, voting, etc, there are a few problems. I've already entered a few bugs on this topic (thanks for passing them on Anandi), but the main problem is that there's no ability to view all new and changed feedback items since your last visit. Expecially for smaller scale betas (like the TAP), someone might post an issue that you've never thought of, but that you'd like to vote for, or there might be a bug report that you have a workaround for.

Has anyone compared Connect to Bugzilla? Again, I haven't had any experience with other beta tracking software, but I've heard a lot about this offering (and it seems quite extensible from their website's information).
# December 5, 2005 7:32 AM
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