Inside MSDN and TechNet : MTPS

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

New Package This! - Supports Community Content

larryj — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:55:00 GMT

You can take it with you!

The new 1.3 version of version of Package This! Now supports exporting Community Content to .hxs and .chm files. It is also simplified into a single .exe.

You can download from CodePlex @ http://www.codeplex.com/packagethis/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=12172

Package This is a GUI tool written in C# for creating help files (.chm and .hxs) from the content obtained from the MSDN Library or the TechNet Library via the MSDN Content Service. You select the content you want from the table of contents, build a help file, and use the content offline. You are making personalized ebooks of MSDN or TechNet content. Both help file formats also give full text search and keyword search.

The Community Content feed is @ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/community-edits(rss).aspx

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