We get some push back from folks who worry about handing over control of our communities to the community itself on http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn . I personally believe it's vital to our success that we trust the community to have control over it's...

Here is a mail from one of my blog readers about our responsiveness during Whidbey. I'm hoping that our product groups will be just as, if not more, responsive during Orcas. Want to know how to increase your teams customer sat... -----Original Message...

A great deal of job satisfaction comes from ones like of the folks they work with. Check out the sprint retrospective we shot 6 weeks ago for Channel9 . If the job content sounds like an interest match and you'd like to subject yourself to working with...

I hear from some folks inside Microsoft that sites like the MSDN forums aren't "sticky", that people don't keep coming back to form a "community", and that they are purely transactional in nature. I don't buy these statements one bit. Here is someone...

Does anyone know if / when we’ll have our 10 year high school reunion Sara Ford's WebLog : Will we have a 10 year high school reunion... . I’ve chosen to skip my 10 year reunion. I figure that the people I wanted to keep in touch with…...

The IE team announced yesterday that they are taking the next step into real customer connection. They opened a public bug database ! Great work guys! I wonder what group at Microsoft gave them that idea and helped proved that it could work? I'm super...

I'm not sure blog spammers are very smart. They need to be more sneaky when trying to get a message through. Take the recent run of Mortgage Loan spam we've been getting on blogs.msdn.com. It looks at though they trying to post the same message to my...

Could Bungie be planning two Halo games, one continuing the original Covenant blasting storyline and the other a related squad-based strategy game, RPG or RTS? What if the "other" Halo game gets released first? MS exec hints at Halo spin-off? - Xbox...

I covered myths #1 and #2 so it's time to start getting into the things I learned while working in Sammamish. Learning #1 is that I never saw so many people depend on IM. Everyone was running Microsoft Office Communicator and they used it. It's was...

It's hard to get on Channel9 lately. They've certainly come a long way from the days of begging and hard networking for content and interviews. We filmed a video of our Scrum retrospective for Developer Solutions with demo's of the first three tools we...

What communities are you a part of now that help you write and develop software? Slashdot | Coding Communities - What Works? . This was a great discussion because it relates directly to my job and my team. The answers given here were pretty varied...

People who work at Microsoft are very concerned with making sure that we aren’t over-moderating the forums. I can read between the lines: people internally want to make sure that we don’t get accused of censoring the forums. Neither do I....

I realized that the Developer Solutions team is filled with bloggers. Only our dev lead and tester don't have blogs today. I felt that my recent posts list would be a good way to help promote the other folks on the team so I've tried to be a little less...

Shawn and I met a while back. He’s forming what I’d consider a “sister team” to our “developer solutions” team. Its cool for developers because now there will be two teams doing full time dogfooding building you great...

At least not in the location I was sitting. In fact the call routing happens off-site, but most calls require one or more call-backs with developer support. I discovered rare for a developer issue to be resolved in the true "1st contact". Like I said...

And you, as the PM, typicaly expect them to ask a clarifying design question of some sort. Here's the question I recevied Monday... "Do you know where we could purchase sulfur or some other sort of fart smelling substance?" Now, its a PM job responcibility...

With over 2,600 bloggers on MSDN its hard to find the bloggers that interest you. I've heard consistently that blog discover ability is a HUGE problem on this site so I wanted to do something about it... but how can you possibly categorize that many bloggers...

On this edition of "Developer Support myth-busters" I’d like to tackle a popular belief held by several folks that work in product development groups. The belief is that PSS labor is cheaper than dev/test/pm labor. Cost is often used as an argument by...

I’m going to post a few entries on the week I spent with the Developer Support team in Issaquah, WA. This entry is meant as in introduction to this series. The next few entries will try and capture what I learned. Microsoft has a program for employees...

If you are developing a site that involves "community features" then I suggest you watch this whole video that's been posted to Channel9 on the www.on10.net development. One highlight includes how they exposed everything on the site as a set of web...

Thanks to Lee for forwarding me this, but apparently there are a TON of splogs that think my blog text is worth something ... I have doubts that I'll ever get a cut of the action. :-)

What's the difference between "Developer Aftermarket Community Solutions", Powertoys, Power Toys, Developer Powertoys, or "Power Toys for Visual Studio? Does it matter? I'm under the beleif that as long as we consistenty ship cool, useful stuff that...

I'll be really interested to see what the next few shows published to http://www.on10.net/ are like. In this case (more so than channel9) the original content is really going to be king since the site really flows around this content and doesn't contain...

Joe is breaking apart his vision for Q&A forum reputation system into three phases. At Microsoft the common terminology for this is "crawl, walk, run". The current MSDN forum reputation system, as it exists today, is probably in the "yet to be born...

So, next time a “stupid” decision gets made rather than sulking about it, re-examine your case honestly then if you still believe in the vision tell yourself (and others) that sanity will prevail then go work towards making sure it does. ...