Jeff Day's Blog : Community Platform

It's Not Just About Bookmarking

Jeff Day — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:21:00 GMT

I've been meaning to blog more often, and some of the questions I'm getting about our new Social Bookmarks app have given me a good excuse to talk about the thinking behind the Social Platform. This blog post started with some tough questions from a senior...(read more)

Social Bookmarking for Technical Professionals

Jeff Day — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:04:00 GMT

The blogosphere is starting to buzz about our new Social Bookmarks preview app that went live today. While most bloggers are focusing on the MSDN version , we have also shipped versions for TechNet , Expression (screenshot below) and a generic Microsoft...(read more)

Community Platform Updates Coming Soon

Jeff Day — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:59:00 GMT

There are several interesting things coming soon from the Community Platform team.

Social Bookmarking
We're releasing a nice Social Bookmarking Preview in late May. Our marketing team is planning some minor hoopla to show the app off at TechEd.

MSDN, TechNet and Expression will all have their own instance of the bookmarking app, so you will experience the app as MSDN Social Bookmarking, TechNet Social Bookmarking, etc. Nevertheless, you are not constrained to bookmarking items on these sites, or even within Microsoft. You will be able to bookmark almost any item on the Internet that has a URL (the exceptions being adult sites and the like).

Social Bookmarking is a useful way for you to save your favorites on the server and access them from any machine or browser. This in itself is helpful for technical professionals who frequently move between machines and browsers. You can apply one or multiple tags to each item you bookmark to help you browse and search your bookmarks later.

The Preview will show off some interesting ideas about how bookmarks and tags can be socially shared. For example, you'll be able to view an aggregated list of bookmarks from all users, along with an aggregated tag cloud. This is an interesting way to explore what other users are interested in, and to discover topics that are popular now. (And yes, we do support private bookmarks that only you can see!)

Most of the core functionality that we're delivering now has been done by other sites like Del.icio.us. What's new is that our experience is fully integrated into the Community Platform and will therefore be available to a wide range of users who have not used other bookmarking sites. In addition, we're moving toward a fully integrated tagging and bookmarking strategy where Forums, CodePlex and Library Annontation (aka Wiki) tags are combined so they can be browsed in a common tag cloud and managed in one place. (Only Forums tags will be integrated in the Social Bookmarking Preview.)

Updated Profile
We're enhancing User Profile to provide a richer experience to view information about yourself and others. Our May release will feature an updated UI that lists the forums contributions and bookmarks for every user. When you view your own profile, you'll have the option of editing your settings.

These changes make each user's profile more attractive and interesting, but they are just a small step in our larger plan to make Profile a rich, central place for users to present themselves to the community and manage their stuff within MSDN, TechNet and Expression.

Forums Migration
While we continue to improve lots of things with Forums 3.x, an all-new Forums solution, the big news is that we're preparing to migrate the old forums to the new application. This migration will start with about 60 forums that we plan to migrate by the end of the month. Examples include the Forefront and Visual Studio forums.

We are trying to be really careful to minimize any disruption for users, moderators and product teams who depend on the forums every day. The migration is meant to be robust, so we are migrating forums posts and threads, user info and user points. One of the thornier problems is that there are 10's of thousands of existing links to the forums, so rather than letting those links break when we move the forums, we're going to update the existing forums to correctly redirect incoming requests for migrated threads to the migrated version of the thread.

We currently expect to migrate the forums in chunks over the summer. The migration process is fairly automated, so it would not be technically challenging to migrate them all at once, but our users and moderators have asked to move more slowly so they have time to prepare for the change.

Senior Program Manager needed for the Community Platform

Jeff Day — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:51:00 GMT

I've got a really interesting job opening for an experienced technical PM who wants to work on some fun Web 2.0 stuff. Here's the detail...

Job Description

DevDiv’s Server & Tools Online team is seeking a highly technical senior program manager to help us build innovative new Community Platform web applications, including forums, community-driven portals, blogs, social bookmarking, a feeds and tags service, plus content management. Our team is focused on transforming MSDN, TechNet and the (new) Expression web sites into the most innovative, community-focused web sites within Microsoft and the industry.

We are seeking a well-rounded senior PM with excellent technical, design and leadership skills. You are a good fit if you have strong passion and experience building great web apps, if you are good at defining and analyzing problems and if you know how to get things done.

This job is a good fit if you…

Have great experience as a PM working on large-scale web applications
Are experienced with web architecture and performance
Understand the social web (e.g. social networking, online communities, web 2.0, etc.)
Are passionate about building great software
Possess great abstract thinking and analytical skills
Have deep understanding of complex web technologies and sites
Care about the details

Specific qualifications include:

Strong technical background with expertise in web technologies like HTTP, ASP.NET, SQL Server, AJAX, JavaScript, XML. LAMP experience also welcome!
Work experience directly related to engineering of complex web sites, tools and user experiences
5+ years successful experience as a technical PM. (Microsoft PM experience desirable but not required.)
Strong cross-group collaboration skills
Demonstrated ability to write stories, functional specs and other technical documents
Experience shipping products/web sites
BS or higher in technical field

Community Platform goes live!

Jeff Day — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:04:00 GMT

The first version of the STO Community Platform went live on Valentine's Day, Thursday, February 14.

My team has built this platform to host all community applications for MSDN, TechNet and the new Expression site. This release includes an all-new Forums app, a new Profile app, and a rewritten Search app.

The most prominent use of the new Forums app is the Expression Forums site. MSDN and TechNet forums are mostly still running on our older "Forums 2.4" codebase. The Community Platform Forums for TechNet and MSDN are live but primarily with feedback and sandbox forums only for now.

Migrating existing 2.4 content and users to the Community Platform is a top priority for our team over the next 100 days. Our goal is to have a substantial chunk of MSDN forums migrated by the end of May in support of a “re-launch” of MSDN & TechNet at TechEd in early June.

New Applications

This Community Platform release features many new applications:

· Forums 3.0: 100% new code that will replace the existing Forums 2.x solution in coming months. Highlights include a phenomenal new UI, automatic updates and our first social tagging deployment. Users and stakeholders who have seen pre-release versions of forums are raving about its rich capabilities and user interface.

· Search 3.0: A rewrite of the existing MSDN/TN search application with improved auto-complete functionality, improved international search (including 20 languages!), and dramatically improved refinements.

· Profile 1.0: A new centralized place for users to manage their personal settings, such as display name, avatar and signature.

· Discovery Services 1.0: A high performance feed and tag “engine” that provides a RESTful interface to query editorially managed and tag-driven dynamic feeds. Forums tagging, search refinements, RSS feeds, forum categories and related sites are some of the features enabled by Discovery Services.

· Feed Management Tool 1.0: A browser-based internal tool that lets site managers and other authorized stakeholders create, edit, tag and schedule both feed items and feeds that are available in both RSS 2.0 and ATOM formats.

· STO Apps 1.0: A centralized portal and framework for all Community Platform management tools. The feed management tool, forums admin, global profanity filter management, tag management and all other Platform tools are available on this site and make use of a shared framework that provides consistent UI and role-based security.

Platform Features

In addition to the stand-alone applications listed above, there are many foundational capabilities and features in the Community Platform. For example:

· Shared UX: The framework is highlighted by the all-new Coronado/Boston masthead design that will be rolled out in all MSDN, TechNet and Expression apps, including the Community Platform apps, the Library, Centers, Code Gallery and future Platform apps.

· Social Tagging and Feeds: Every application can leverage the rich social tagging and feed support enabled by Discovery Services.

· Feed Service End Point: A universal endpoint to query feeds from any Community Platform application.

· Friendly URLs: Simple URLs that are easier to type and remember.

· Globalization Framework: Rich standardized globalization support that can be extended and customized as needed by individual apps.

· Multi-Brand Support: Every application is available in each brand. MSDN, TechNet, Expression and Microsoft brands are supported currently.

· Shared App Framework: All apps are built on a common framework that provides master pages and controls, config, instrumentation, error logging and much more.

What’s Next

This release represents the completion of my teams's Coronado project, and we're now moving onto the next wave of Community Platform development, code named Catalina. In addition to updates to all existing applications and the Platform itself, Catalina will feature a new Portals application, Content Management, and a Social Tagging and Bookmarking solution. More details to follow soon!

A blog about MSDN and TechNet

Jeff Day — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:39:00 GMT

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.