The major themes for our Social Platform investments

dantr — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:04:00 GMT

In May, when I first blogged on our social vision, I also said that we'd publish more information about our site and platform roadmap. We're ready to start doing that now. They best way to begin the conversation is to first talk about our investments themes.

Think of themes as high-level things that we think are important. They are...

An Integrated Site Experience

MSDN and TechNet have evolved over time as a family of loosely connected function-specific sites, like the Library, Forums, Blogs, and Centers. While this has allowed each site/app to innovate around its core task, the overall site experience has become fragmented, making it harder than it should be to use, and lowering success rates with core tasks like Learning and Troubleshooting. We are in the process of unifying all of our major sites and apps on a single set of services for UX and navigation, search, tagging, and identity. This means single sign on, centralized profile and recognition points, and better usability.

Better Discovery

It probably comes as no surprise that the #1 driver of customer satisfaction on MSDN and TechNet is simple discoverability. People are happy and satisfied when they find what they need. We are working towards improving discoverability from several angles including ongoing enhancements to our site search, site and center design, and the intelligent surfacing of "related" and "community recommended" content.

Enabling Social Connections

We are opening the sites up to the technical community so that people can better connect and share knowledge. This means enabling people to have rich identities on our sites, contribute content, find each other, form groups, and collaborate.

-Dan

Social Platform (aka Community Platform)

dantr — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:23:00 GMT

To better support new social experiences in applications like Forums and Social Bookmarks, we are investing in a new Social Platform, which will provide centralized services for User Profile, Recognition, and Tagging. By centralizing these services, MSDN and TechNet will put the individual customer at the center of the site (network) experience, increase discoverability of people and resources, and provide an integrated customer experience across the entire family of MSDN and TechNet applications.

For example, by using a single user profile across Forums, Bookmarking, and Code Gallery, a customer will only need to sign in once to engage with all those applications, and contributions made within each application will all be recognized in the same user profile. Likewise, a single tagging service allows us to improve discovery and navigation by providing customers with feeds of various resources (e.g., Code Samples, Centers, Library Articles, Forums Posts, Bookmarks, etc.) filtered by tag.

Currently the team is in the process of integrating various applications like Code Gallery and Library with the Social Platform.

We are committed to public APIs for the Social Platform and in the future we envision integration scenarios with other Microsoft sites as well as sites across the internet.

In the next couple weeks I will publish our roadmap and/or prioritized list of platform features and capabilities so that you have a good idea of what is happening and the relative importance as we build out the platform.

Dan Truax's Blog : social

The major themes for our Social Platform investments

Social Platform (aka Community Platform)