Well i'd like to tip my hat and join in please!

A Partner wiki would be a great resource.

Cheers

I would be interested in getting involved from a 'community partner' perspective. If you need assistance with building it, the UK community may well be willing to lend a hand :-)

Perhaps it is worth having discussions at DDD5?

Regards, Alan Dean

In what way would this differ from say the forums that are available?

If you're looking for wiki as a shared resource that is value accretive for stuff like tips, tricks etc then that makes sense. It's worth checking out how SAP is doing this. It's a start and a proxy for how a company might combine different social media efforts. Seems to be working very well for them.

I don't see why it wouldn't be a useful resource and could well help foster/encourage greater community spirit among UK partners.

Steve,

I don't think Microsoft providing *another* place to go and get product info is a good idea. MSDN (and its forums) is (generally) the place to go and get that and indeed,  MSDN are launching their own wiki initiative very soon.

Where is the less-techno-oriented person going to go to get info? If they stumble upon a UK wiki they may think they have found their nirvana whereas really they're missing out on the plethora of knowledge in MSDN/technet/whatever.

I'm going to need this one selling to me a bit more I'm afraid.

-Jamie

I think its a great idea... hopefully it wont be a repeat of the infomation that is already out there - but if it isnt Im up for it!

Ross

I think it would be great to have a place to share knowledge to and amongst partners. In the spirit of using your own tools you could build it on Sharepoint and if someone wanted to have a local version they could pull it into Groove to take on the road.

I agree too though with the sentiment about duplicating MSDN info though... although the MSDN team have gone down wildly in my estimation recently with their re-org... what's with the stupid id based URLs? Totally useless with browser history. Also, a load of the reference pages I used on a weekly basis went AWOL without re-directs leading to me using multiple google searches and pulling up their cached version.

I'm all for Wikiness in principle  however my authorised particpation depends on what the Wiki's parameters are.

if the Wiki is all about partner relationships and working with Microsoft then I can see participation being encouraged, if it's more technet and technically orientated then I don't think my organisation would support participation.  

The view would be that the secrets we have are our differentiators. we have had significant resistance to Wikis in the office amongst even our engineer community there is still a great deal of propriety over knowledge.

Great idea. Specifically as it relates to competition, industry, and other non-technical topics. Microsoft has a lot of self imposed guidelines in the what they will publish or how they talk about competition. You can go a long way past those guidelines and still be legal and ethical in your competitive approach (i.e. don't be Oracle, getting information via dumpster diving and all). Enabling a direct partner to partner exchange is a powerful way to achieve this. And frankly, as it relates to competition, industry, etc, the partners know more than Microsoft does anyway.

I think it's a great idea.

Personally, I find the information I get from blogs like your own and from talking to colleagues at other Partners much more useful than even the Microsoft Partner site.

Thanks

Jamie

Hi Steve

I think that a Wiki is an interesting proposition.

In our experience, both internally at cScape and with our clients, success rests on a number of factors like simplicity, subject matter, uniqueness etc, etc, but most importantly on aligning the interests of the group (in this case the whole of the partner community) with the individual contributor (individual partner).

Probably the most successful way that we have achieved this in the past has been to incentivise wiki participation with something that the individuals can use in a personal capacity. In the case of the wiki your talking about this might be that the results of the wiki are published in a small booklet or ebook co-branded by Microsoft and the participating partner. That way each participant partner gets their own publication to use in client acquisition or promotion etc.

From the above it does seem that there is considerable good will towards the idea so in principle please count cScape in as one of the 50.

Best wishes

Richard

Hi Steve,

I think it's a great idea, you can count me in. If the chat at DDD5 (mentioned above) happens, let me know, I'd be interested to take part.

Works for me - Wikipdeia is indispensible to be as a knowledge source for all kinds of things.    If there was a place to go to get community-sourced, real life MS product-based information without having to deal with all the rubbish that forums bring with them (thread/conversation-based format, flaming and bitching etc!) then that would be invaluable.

Not sure how much of a contributor I'd be but I'd be a grateful reader!

Rich