Kickoff post about MSDN and TechNet website futures

2006-11-16T09:48:00Z

Hi. I’m Justin Grant, and I’m a product manager for the MSDN and TechNet websites. My new blog will discuss new features we’re planning on MSDN and TechNet, will review some of the research and thinking behind those features, and most importantly I want to get your feedback so we can ship the right stuff! This is my first blog post ever, so be patient with me in case I don’t do the blogging thing right yet. I’ll learn.

About me

Here's what I do at work: First, I try to figure out what you want most from MSDN and TechNet, mostly via quantitative research and usability testing. Then I try to build consensus among my teammates (and the executives who pay the bills!) that the specific features you demand should actually get built. Finally, I work with the engineering and content teams who actually create MSDN and TechNet and who are working to get you more of what you want (like better search, more code samples, and more error message troubleshooting info) and less of what you don’t want (like non-technical content, “marketing”, and technical content about one product spread across 10 different sites).

From my perspective, we’ve got a long way to go. I read hundreds of surveys every year (those surveys don’t actually go into a black hole!). There’s nothing quite as humbling as having 500 people tell you, in varying degrees of politeness J, that your site needs improvement and you should be embarrassed that you haven’t fixed it yet. Sure, I’m very pleased with improvements in search relevance we’ve made this past year, and I’m excited about new features like MSDN Wiki and Search Auto-Complete. But I want more! Sooner! Better!

My impatience comes from memory of being in your shoes. As a Developer, my first job was as an Intern at IBM in 1984. I remember when they wheeled in the first IBM AT and how incredibly fast it was! For more than 10 years I worked at several small software companies. I wrote device drivers, VAX terminal apps, server applications, setup programs, ActiveX controls, and even some of the original CGIs for Ask Jeeves. From there I moved into being an ITPro, when I ran a small data center for a .com startup. I rolled out our company's first NT domain, deployed the first monitoring tools, and learned that nothing encourages rigorous change-management processes and server redundancy like wearing a pager 24x7! It was a small company, so I also maintained desktops and learned quickly that sales guys never agree that fixing a failed disk drive on a production server is more important than if they can’t print. Sound familiar?

I came to Microsoft in 1998 after complaining so consistently about the scalability and manageability of IIS that they gave me a job to fix it! :-) Since then I’ve worked on several Microsoft teams and shipped a lot of software, but my MSDN and TechNet job is my favorite so far, because I get to focus on making things better for people who have jobs like I used to have-- Developers and ITPros who love technology but are frustrated at how simple things are made hard by inadequate documentation, not enough examples, and the difficulty of getting quick help when you need it.

Topics for later posts

Anyway, enough about me. Below are a few things I want to give you an overview of some of the things I’m going to talk about in later posts. All of the things below are important goals for MSDN and TechNet in the next year.

Improved Search

This is our top priority. We have improved search a lot this past year by switching to Windows Live search and making our pages more crawler-friendly. Over the next year we’re adding the ability to filter search by product or technology, auto-complete for search queries, and more. I'll mention some of those innovations in later posts. Also check out the MSDN and TechNet Search Blog.

Integrated Centers

This means expanding Developer Centers and Tech Centers to contain more technical resources, including Library Documentation, Knowledge Base, Downloads, Forums, and more. We want to give you a “one-stop shop” for each technical topic, so you won’t have to hunt around MSDN or Microsoft.com to find stuff related to that product. You'll also be able to filter searches in the same way, so you can filter search results to only one product but include documentation, forums, KB articles, etc.

Community Content

We need to help the community-- meaning not only people outside Microsoft but also Microsoft employees volunteering their spare time-- to add and revise content which didn’t make it into the documentation. Initiatives we’re working on in this area include MSDN Wiki, MSDN Forums, and TechNet Forums.

No Dead Ends

One of the most frustrating things is to end up at a page which is *close* to what you're looking for, but not close enough to help. So we're working to tie pages together better. For example, the "related links" section of http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2x7h1hfk(VS.80).aspx shows links that other users have visited which are related to this page. Over time we'll increase relevance of these links, expand to more of the site, and add sources like related forums, related searches, and more. One particularly exciting potential use of this approach might be adding making Dev or Tech Center home pages more interesting by adding "top searches", "top blogs", "top forums", etc. links which are also built by mining logs.

Easier Learning for Newbies

We also need to make it easier to get started with a product or technology. Newbies are not dummies… they’re typically experienced professionals who are only new to *this product*. We need good introductory technical content designed for smart people who want a quick overview and links to learn more. For example, Getting Started with Visual Basic. And our sites need to be more consistent so if you get to know one product's site you can apply that knowledge to other products. Consistent menus on developer centers (like VB, C#, C++, SQL Server, BizTalk, etc.) are a start.

Troubleshooting

It's too hard today to troubleshoot and fix problems. We need to make it easier to understand why you’re getting an error message, and what you can do about it. It must be easier to file bugs on products and see a list of known issues and workarounds. You need to be able to leverage online communities for free help when you have a problem, and those communities need to respond more quickly and reliably than today. And if you need Microsoft Support, that experience needs to be more efficient, like transferring a question from an Online Forum to a Support Engineer to avoid that maddening phone tree at the start of every support call. http://blogs.msdn.com/helpsupport/ will talk about what's coming in this area.

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In future posts, I’m going to dig into the items above. I’m looking forward to your feedback and support. Thanks for listening!

MSDN and TechNet wesbsites futures and previews

Kickoff post about MSDN and TechNet website futures

About me

Topics for later posts