It's that time, that time of year
I've got a bad 80s heavy metal song in my head, and I can't even find out what it is either via MSN Search or Google. Oh well, I suppose I have more important things to do.
Well, it's review time again here at Microsoft. As you'll see on many other MS blogs out there, they've revised our system (yet again!). I guess I should be glad there are constant revisions to improve things, rather than a stagnant bad system.
The basic process is the same, though: Review what you've done in the past year, figure out if you met your goals, and write it all up. And that's the painful part. It shouldn't be difficult but it just seems like this large looming task. Like the 10-page paper in school that you waited until the night before it was due to complete it. So I've written about a quarter of my review, and here I am procrastinating. (It's due tomorrow) But hey - posting in my blog was one of my commitments for the year. So there!
Well, the TAP program is proceeding along nicely - people seem to be making good progress building their MSS 2007 applications. I especially appreciate the 6 participants who have sent us a demo number to their applications that we can use internally. I send the phone numbers to the team to try out, and get feedback from the team on the app. It's also great for the team to see *real* customers building *real* applications on our platform. Kind of makes the whole software development/shipping a product thing concrete.
And our Beta program, which is a much larger group of participants, is also starting out well. We switched to a slightly different paradigm for answering questions -- we've used newsgroups in the past, but for this Beta I set up a "listserv". (Yay 1990s technology!). There are pros and cons to each method, but I chose an email discussion list because that was the easiest way to ensure our product team could see the participants questions immediately (and passively, since most people have email up all the time here.) With a newsgroup you have the extra step of opening your NNTP client and checking it for new posts. With email, the stuff just shows up.
Part of my responsibilities involve making sure the questions are answered and tracking stats for the list like # of posts and topics covered. The cool thing about email is that people have been jumping on it right away. So there are very few questions that I need to proactively find an owner for. The other good thing is that the list is archived online (securely!) so people can review past messages as well. There's a lot of traffic on the list, but it's been on-topic and respectful, for the most part.
Oh, and the Connect site has been upgraded to version 2.0, with some very cool features around configuring feedback forms and displaying existing feedback submitted. I will probably make some tweaks here over the next few weeks, to automate some of the sorting I do of all the different types of pre-release bugs and suggestions that come in.
So what do you think of the new Connect site, the Beta listserv, or anything else our team is doing?
