A blog about MSDN and TechNet
Welcome to my new blog, where I plan to write about my team's work to enhance the MSDN and TechNet web sites.
I am the Group Program Manager for the Server & Tools Online team. I am one of the managers for a standard Microsoft engineering team that consists of program managers, developers and testers. Roughly speaking, program managers work with customers and other stakeholders, like product groups or customer support, inside Microsoft to figure out and prioritize business requirements. We also work with developers and testers to define the functionality and features that are built.
There are several engineering teams in my larger business group. A large team builds the MSDN & TechNet Publishing System (MTPS), which is especially good at hosting the MSDN and TechNet libraries and the MSDN Wiki (for a wiki example, see Community Content on library pages). Another team builds Codeplex. We have yet other teams who are responsible for subscriptions and downloads.
My team is responsible for other community content on MSDN and TechNet, including forums and blogs. We also build the new MSDN and TechNet search application, which provides dramatically improved search for the sites compared to earlier solutions. Our team also built the Learning Platform, which helps MSDN and TechNet users find and acquire learning resources, such as eLearning courses and books.
My team is developing a new Community Platform solution, which provides a common architecture and a suite of services that will enable the next generation of MSDN and TechNet applications. We are currently building an all-new forums application (first version available in early 2008) on top of the community platform, and we have ported the search application to it. Later in 2008, we plan to release portals, blogs and social bookmarking applications on the Community platform.
The very name of our new platform reflects the degree to which we plan to embrace and enable Community applications for MSDN and TechNet. As a shorthand, we talk about enabling Web 2.0, by which we mean allowing our users to both consume and contribute content to our sites.
I plan to use my blog to talk more about my team's vision for MSDN and TechNet, the Community Platform, and the applications we're writing for the platform. I hope someone finds it interesting and helpful.
