Microsoft Forums Client update: Requirements, specifications, and bears oh my!

JeremyKelley — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:55:00 GMT

I'm starting to shovel some coal into the engine of the Microsoft Forums Client project. As of this morning you can find my rough draft requirements for the project at the CodePlex site for the project. I've spent a pretty long time working on the requirements, I know the document itself has some areas that need to be cleaned up and fleshed out, but I believe I've got a pretty solid list of everything a great offline client should have.

What are the next steps? From here I hope everyone reading will go check out the requirements document and leave your feedback. Very soon we will be turning those requirements into individual feature items in the project issue tracker for everyone to vote on. Once we get a good, prioritized, list of features the coding can begin!

Keep in mind that just because a feature shows up in the requirements doesn't mean it's going to make it into release one. We think it's important to get something with basic functionality, and solid stability, out as fast as we can. That doesn't mean we' won't try to do as many features as we can, it just means that some things may have to wait for release 2 or release 3. I also think that given the nature of the project, we'll be able to keep making releases over time, even after the core team is also working on other things.

I'm really excited about this project. I've spent this week talking to a lot of people at the Microsoft MVP Summit about forms in general and the client app in particular. I've heard a lot of passionate voices around these things and I'll try and post a good recap of the week once I get through tomorrow.

For anyone who's at the Summit, I'll be at the Communities side session from 2:00 - 5:30 or so on Thursday, May 16, 2008.

Announcing a new collaborative project

JeremyKelley — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:54:22 GMT

What I've been up to...

Over the last six months or so I've ended up becoming the community business owner for the MSDN Forums. What does that mean exactly? Well it's hard to say. Basically I stand in between Microsoft and all of our community members on the forums to represent both sides.

Internally it's my job to make sure that the team responsible for making and supporting the forums has the voice of the MSDN customer. I also go around to teams at Microsoft and talk to them about how they can improve their forums, whether it's spending more time on them, or changing the way they interact with people on them.

Externally, it's my job to help establish moderator guidelines, and work with the moderators when issues need to be resolved (they can tell you whether I'm any good at that last part).

The new project...

One of the issues that I've heard from a lot of different sources is the need for a tool that would let people read the forums offline, and compose responses when they don't have an Internet connection.

Several projects like this have been attempted before, each meeting with varied amounts of success. We're going to add another one to the list.

Why this one will work...

This time around we've got a couple things going for us to enable our success on this project.

First, the forums team is supportive of the project. We've talked with them about it, and we're keeping close ties to make sure they know what we're doing and so we can get help if we need it.

Second, since the team has just released a new platform (check it out here) they're really focused on making it a success. To the point that providing an API that we can work with has been a high priority. The API isn't publicly accessible quite yet, but it should be soon.

How can you help...

We've started up a project on CodePlex where we'll be doing all of our work. So far the scope document is published, so feel free to head over and give us some feedback on it.

The first question we need to answer is whether to build a standalone app or a plugin for something else. I'd love any suggestions you have. Especially since this tool is all for you my loyal readers! If we don't build the right tool then we haven't done our job.

As we go along there will be plenty more opportunities to provide input on the design and requirements, as well as helping us actually build it if you're that way inclined!

I'm really excited about this project, so I hope we can make it rock. With your help as always.