MSDN Office Developer Center

MSDN Developer Centers pull together content and resources around specific products and technologies. They connect developers with code samples, community sites, technical articles and documentation, upcoming events, and much more. The MSDN Office Developer Center (ODC) provides a developer roadmap to understand and work with Office System programs, servers, services, tools and technologies.

As we prepare for our next product release (Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010), we worked on a set of site updates to improve navigation, increase discoverability of content, and add more community content and features.

Here’s a summary of new features and updated pages:

Home (Update): Latest blog posts and bio rotator from Microsoft employees experts in Office and SharePoint development. More featured MVP bios and articles. Office resources such as MSDN Magazine articles, Channel 9 videos, Books, Code Gallery samples, and more scoped to Office and SharePoint development.

Products tab (new): The Microsoft Office system evolved from a suite of personal productivity products into a comprehensive, multifaceted, and integrated system. Building on a solid foundation of familiar tools, the Microsoft Office system today includes applications, servers, services, and technologies designed to work together to solve a wide array of business problems. We have lots of products that have their own developer story, so we built a tab that provides quick access to developer resources by product. This navigation matches Office Online’s Products tab navigation.

Learn (update): Provides quick access to getting started resources and tools that help you learn more about the Office Developer roadmap. Redesigned to include links to product-specific learn pages on the developer center (such as Access, SharePoint Server, and so on). All links on the page are scoped to Office Development content, and the certifications and exams listed are specifically for Office and SharePoint developers. We also showcase a featured book of the month on this page with a link to the new Office Developer Bookstore.

Downloads (update): Redesigned to align more closely with what our customers wanted. We received feedback that made it clear that our developers wanted more than a list of most popular or latest downloads. This page provides now links to Downloads (By Product), quick access to the Microsoft Download Center, Office Downloads and Updates, CodePlex, Code Gallery, and more – all scoped to Office Development. We kept our four most popular downloads at the top of the page so they are easy to find. Finally, we provide at the bottom an RSS pull for our recently published downloads.

Support (update): This page is now scoped to Office, rather than general help links. In addition to a new template, we added scoped links to each product’s Solution Center as well as forum and newsgroup links. Section 4 adds links to other support-related pages on the Office Developer Center, as well as cross-links to Office, Project, and SharePoint TechCenters on TechNet and to the Help and How-to Center on Office Online.

Community (update): The “Office Community Resources” set takes developers deeper into Office Community content, both within the MSDN Office Developer Center and outside it. The “Featured Community Content” set rotates the latest content from our MVPs, partners, and experts from the Office and SharePoint developer community. Bio rotators include photos and links to their MVP profiles. We also rotate a set of featured developer books from our MVPs with a link back to our Bookstore. We added dynamic feeds for Twitter, Delicious, and DIGG, scoped to Office development as well as an invitation to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. The Community Submitted Content page in this section now features Community Highlights, an MVP rotator, a list of top contributors, as well as a comprehensive list of content that our MVPs and community partners have written. In addition to the community section of the portal, we’ve also added MVP rotators to our product home pages as well as improved their product-specific Community pages.

Forums tab (new): You can now access MSDN Forums related to Office Development, Office Live Development, SharePoint Products and Technologies, and Unified Communications from the MSDN Office Developer Center.

If you’d like to hear more about what we do or provide feedback, follow us on Twitter, and join our Facebook group. We have a survey where you can leave comments related to your experience with the MSDN Office Developer Center.

Coming soon Open XML Developer Center revamp!