Inside MSDN and TechNet : News and Announcements

Launching lightweight Beta view for MSDN library!

aram — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:12:00 GMT

The Library Experience (LEX) team is proud to announce the release of " lightweight beta view" for MSDN library ! Please check-out the new library view at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system(lightweight).aspx . We blogged about ScriptFree (loband)...(read more)

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.

The Buzz Control

larryj — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:07:00 GMT

The "buzz" control launched in the MSDN/TechNet Labs today. It leverages cool features available in Microsoft Live Search. Try it with some URL's that have lots pointers like the following...

.Net 3.0 Download - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en
IE Home Page - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
IE Download Page - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

Cut and paste one of the URL's into the Buzz Control, press go and then use the control to drill around and see the information stitch together for browsing. Cool stuff.

The Oracle says to keep in your mind that there are no tags, there are no tags...

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

My Team Launched our Internal Innovation Contest - You Benefit!

larryj — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:16:00 GMT

Today we are launching the MSDN and TechNet Labs and opening it up to the various teams that I work with. It is the accumulation of a lot of work on dedicated members of our team to provide a means to incubate ideas and offer a framework for projects to gather feedback from the community.

One of the key pillars in encouraging innovation in our team was to provide a means for the frictionless incubation of ideas and get them in front of the community to gather feedback see what resonates. We have been doing this for a while with the MSDN and TechNet Search project and it really set the bar on how we wanted to proceed.

We are encouraging this by having them gather their team, get their goals and the project plan ready, assigning the roles and filling out a project submission application via our internal SharePoint site using InfoPath. They may also submit the project for consideration in the Quarterly Innovation Contest and everyone gets a limited edition Labs T-Shirt and then qualifies to be judged as the best entrant for the quarter and win a pro-edition XBOX 360.

We do some cool stuff here at Microsoft and this is just another approach to fostering ideas from our highly talented team members. Maybe you are interested in joining our team?

The externally facing home page for Labs is @

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/v20/

The externally facing blog for the Lab to be used by the leads is @

http://blogs.msdn.com/innovation/

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

Announcing the Launch of MSDN and TechNet Labs

larryj — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 03:17:00 GMT

This week the team finished up the final UX design, put the backend systems in place and launched the "MSDN and TechNet Labs" project to promote innovation and community involvement with our team.

I wanted to outline the goals, charter and how we are managing the lab projects.

Vision

Publicly incubate experiences & technologies
Promote and showcase resonant ideas
Evolve or kill ideas that fail to resonate

Charter

Enable motivated team members to express ideas
Trust and support them in bringing their ideas to fruition
Interact with our Customer Community
Incorporate feedback into development cycle

Structure

Comprehensive Development Environment
Flexible Public Sandbox
Enable Rapid Prototyping and Evolution

Strategy

Focus on projects that add value for our customers
Build on our Products and Platforms
Influence product planning and management

The goal of the effort it to reach out and encourage the community give us input into how we bring features and services to our Developer and IT Professional audiences.

The leaders of the team will be posting here regularly and providing an overview into the strategies of the projects and our learning’s incubating projects in the lab. We are using Visual Studio Team System for the development platform and we will post our best practices as we prototype and then move those codebases into production systems.

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