Inside MSDN and TechNet : MSDN2

MSDN: "The Highlander" and there will be only one!

larryj — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:39:00 GMT

Building and evolving the MSDN site is a challenge. I am not stating this to try to impress you with a “gee that is hard" vibe, but to acknowledge that when you run systems and sites that have histories that span multi-year life cycles (decades wrt MSDN <g/>), you have a whole different responsibility to the people who depend worldwide on what you do. Even the simplest, flip decision can have impact on the productivity of people who make their living supporting, implementing, writing applications and defending your efforts. We take this responsibility very seriously and it is imperative that we make the best decisions to keep developers minimally impacted by things we do on MSDN in the Library and still move productivity forward.

We set out on journey to re-build MSDN (and now TechNet and Expression as we have on-boarded their businesses to our platform) as a data driven system that could scale to the large amount of documents that we knew it would house over time. These plans pushed us faster than we even imagined as Visual Studio became a juggernaut of release candidates, community technical previews and beta's with each documentation release needing us to be more flexible and performant. Today the MSDN system houses around 11 million documents in SQL Server.

We started the new system to release with Visual Studio 2005 and it has progressed a great deal in that time. I will blog on that in another post. One of the persistent issues that was hanging out there and bugged you and really bugged me, was the continued existence of the classic MSDN cluster that housed a mixed bag of older, localized library content and other disparate sites that had not been orginally prioritized to migrate to the new system when we built MSDN2. The good news is that we applied some folks from the team who are really good at being persistent and they managed to work with the teams and get all the content migrated and off the old system. Yesterday we shut off the old cluster and today we finished the collapse of the URL into just http://MSDN.Microsoft.com!

Now all URL’s point to the same site and same content.

My apologies for the time it took to finish this and I look forward to your feedback.

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for the MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure and Services Team

Upcoming "Friends of MSDN/TechNet Library Garage" Event in Bellevue, WA

larryj — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:04:00 GMT

Please head on over and join the "Friends of the MSDN Library" facebook group as we will be sending out invitations shortly!

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16125221070

We are hosting a Feedback and Garage event on Thursday, July 31st in Bellevue to show the latest design comps and updates to make the MSDN Library fresh and more productive.

We will focus on...

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Quality of Service - Our measurements and architecture changes to improve the speed and caching of the MSDN Library around the world.
Library 3.0 - New design comps and presentation on the next generation of the MSDN Library
Services - We will show the thinking on the RESTian model for integration services for MSDN. We will show Package This! and a prototype caching application for Technical Documentation.
MSDN WorkPlace - Our new system for submission of articles from the Community into MSDN and TechNet

And more...

Food!
Swag!
Beer!

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for the MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure and Services Team

Interested in Helping us Shape the Next Version of the MSDN Library?

larryj — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:32:00 GMT

We have put a facebook group together to aggregate together the folks who want to work with us to provide feedback, usability and ideas for the next generation of the MSDN Library. We call this project Library 3.0 and we will be organizing events and presentations from this group to bring us together on the project. My goal is build quorum of members over the next months with kickoff’s in late May for the first events.

Join the “Friends of the MSDN Library” Group on facebook : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16125221070

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure Team

Invitation to MVP's attending the MVP Summit - Come Hear About our New Community Content System

larryj — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:53:00 GMT

Hello MVP's!

I invite you to attend our session on our brand new edge-based system and tools that supports the direct contribution of MVP Articles and Technical Documents to MSDN and TechNet Libraries.

TITLE: Help - MVP Publishing Opportunities on MSDN with WorkPlace
BR389
WHEN: Wednesday, April 16, 9:00 - 10:30
SPEAKERS: Steve Butler, Larry Jordan

Come hear about the new WorkPlace project that will transform your MVP relationship with MSDN. The leaders of MSDN will be showing the prototype of an upcoming capability for MSDN that will support MVP publishing into the MSDN Library and other cool features to enable your influence and customer impact for the Developer Audience on MSDN.

RSVP though our facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10425053871
Join the MSDN Group on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=15930920331
Add MSDN to you LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/38395/3A04480F886E

Swag shots for the talk...

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure Team

MSDN Wiki turns one year old

larryj — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:18:00 GMT

Soma posted on the MSDN Wiki being one year old. It has been a fun project and we have lots more in store for the coming year!

MSDN Library Performance Update

larryj — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 01:04:00 GMT

You have told us in many forums and blog posts over the last year that the continued corpus of documentation and features in the MSDN library has affected the page weights and site performance and we have heard you. In response, we kicked off a project to address these issues and look at the technologies around ASP.NET AJAX and to use it even more comprehensively across the site. We also dug deep into the TOC page weight and bytes between the client and the server.

We launched this into our labs and iterated until we had the right things in place. The whole of MSDN2 went through a significant re-write of our rendering approaches and we launched those updates into production today. The MSDN library is snappier and the TOC maps to the content quickly and in sync with your library navigation. Overall we are pleased with the results and considering the 10m documents in all the of languages we are hosting today, it is nice to see Microsoft technologies like SQL Server 2005 and ASP.NET continue to differentiate in one of most demanding environments that my team manages.

Here's a little reading trick for you, when you want to toggle the TOC to read the article in the full width of the browser, just press the letter "T" on your keyboard to hide and toggle the TOC control from the page.

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure Team

MSDN Tagging Launches

larryj — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:10:00 GMT

The MSDN Team Launched Tagging across the entire corpus of the MSDN Library (it is present anyplace that Community Content is enabled) and we are ready for your Folksonomies!

The MTPS Tagging feature enables customers and authors to add and remove visible keyword tags to both topic pages and wiki blocks to improve discoverability of the library content. The ability to add tags to content will be enabled for teams who have opted into the Community Content (wiki annotations) feature in MTPS.

A consolidated ‘tag cloud’ view of all tags is shown on the MSDN Library home page and provides a way to navigate content by associated metadata. The Browse by tags pages enable discovery of content through progressive refinement of tags.

As with the Community Content blocks, anyone can add tags to content provided they have a Live ID, a display name (selected at signup) and an agreement to the Community Terms of Use.

Tags list (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tags-list.aspx)

Larry W Jordan Jr - Product Unit Manager for MSDN and TechNet Infrastructure Team

You Can Take it With You - New CodePlex Project for MSDN2 Content Packaging

larryj — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:50:00 GMT

Today Erik and the team launched a new CodePlex project that allows you to package content dynamically from MSDN2 Library Content and build CHM or HxS files for the ultimate in content portability. It allows you to craft libraries specific to a project or set of technologies and bring technical content with disconnected or local for more specificity. Be sure to check this out and let us know what you think.