Inside MSDN and TechNet : Search and Discoverability

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)

New MSDN,TechNet and Expressions Subscriptions UX Re-Launched

larryj — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:19:00 GMT

We have taken a bunch of your feedback and last night we updated the UX for downloads for MSDN, TechNet and Expression subscriptions.

You can read the entire update post from Chris Deluca who leads the development team for the Subscriptions site and platform @ http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnsubscriptions/archive/2008/07/30/new-and-improved-subscriber-download-ui-is-live.aspx

Please add your feedback and comments to Chris's post, we want to hear from you!

Check it out @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx

Here is the update list of features...

The following list summarizes the features and improvements in the new UI in this release:

· The “twitchy” fly-out menu with the strange mouse behavior is gone. RIP.

· The product list is categorized. This was the most commonly requested organization structure.

· The table of contents has been flattened from three levels to two so finding products will be easier.

· The list of products can be narrowed easily by using the search filter.

· You can find products by using the filtered search or by browsing the table of contents.

· You can now search on part of a product name, e.g. “2007,” or on the name of an edition, e.g. “Ultimate” (as in Windows Vista Ultimate or Microsoft Office Ultimate).

· If a file contains more than one product edition, the names of the editions are listed in plain view.

· File downloading, key related tasks, and product information are provided on the same page so you will no longer have to navigate from one page where you search for a product to another where you download files and claim keys. And if you encounter an error on the site, you’ll no longer be taken to a separate error page.

· File downloading, key related tasks, and relevant information can be seen in a single row so you’ll no longer have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find product keys.

· Download sizes are displayed prominently so you can see how big the file is before you initiate the download.

· You can now sort product files by the date they were updated, or by their availability based on your subscription level.

· The site will “remember” your last settings for media type, e.g. “DVD,” and architecture, e.g. “x86.” If no files match your settings, the site will automatically suggest less-restrictive settings.

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

New Subscriber Downloads Mock-ups

larryj — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:22:00 GMT

We want your feedback!

Check out the new Mockups for the MSDN Subscriber Site for the interface for managing your subscription and downloads with MSDN.

We value your feedback and you can interact with team directly @ http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnsubscriptions/pages/more-info-please.aspx

Thanks in Advance,

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

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

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