Happy New Year!
Greetings, Programs!
I've been extraordinarily busy both at work and away from it and we've all been working hard on the next major version of Connect- 4.0. Apologies for not having more content here lately, but as a New Year's resolution I'll update more frequently. :)
So what's been going on? We've been working on the next version of Connect, currently slated for deployment in the first half of 2009- I'll have more details on what you can expect, when you can expect it, and what we're working on next in upcoming posts.
What I've been focused on almost exclusively for a while now is enabling Connect to work with Team Foundation Server. As many of you may know, Microsoft has used a tool called Product Studio for tracking bugs and issues for years, but with the advent of Team Foundation Server and its much richer feature set, we're working hard to enable the feedback you submit to be managed within our TFS systems internally- we already have some support for it, but we're not yet hitting the real deep value we can derive from Team Foundation Server.
I've also been taking quite a few of the lessons we learned from how we receive feedback, bugs and suggestions and closing the loop with our customers (you folks!) and working them into the next generation of our product. A major challenge has always been- "how do you enable a relatively small dev team to communicate effectively with customers numbering in the tens of thousands?" Certainly, there's no easy answer to that question, but there's a lot we can do, and I'm confident everyone who uses Connect will appreciate what we're doing in that regard.
Look in the next few days for some discussions of what we're bringing to the table- RSS is coming, as are tools for more effective collaboration between MS staff and customers submitting feedback. And thanks for using Connect!
