scooblog by josh ledgard : Community Wins

Testing Community Based Open Source projects for corporations

jledgard — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:41:30 GMT

John's blog postings on testing open source projects where recently picked up by Mary Jo. Not bad PR for the work our team has been doing and good lessons to read if your team is looking at taking components open.

Our team has learned many lessons about the open source world since we released our first power toy to an open source site. Since that first release, we have had bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions. My suggestions below are based on our team’s experience. I hope you find my thoughts useful.

Source: John D'Addamio's blog : Recommendations for corporate teams developing Community Based Open Source projects

Good hire by Sandy & Crew... Yag goes to work on Communities

jledgard — Fri, 05 May 2006 19:32:32 GMT

Yag, a fixture in the foxpro/data community, has decided to take on the challenge of architecting community platform infrastructure at Microsoft. This means that he’ll get to hear at lot more of my griping and brain farts than he did when he was in the same division as me. :-) I can only see upside for the developer community in this move. First order of business… deliver web services for forums… the Developer Solutions team wrote a spec, lets get’em going!

Here it is in his own words.

VS Data Team's WebLog : Yag moves on and stays at the same time (by yag).

I accepted this position because it marries the community issues that I’m so passionate about, with the ability to quickly and immediately touch our customers around the world. In essence, I will be responsible for a multi-release plan developing a platform that includes the following:
a. blogs.msdn.com,
b. forums.microsoft.com,
c. on-line chats,
d. CodeZone search,
e. GotDotNet
f. and others…

We want to turn this into a platform that every division in Microsoft can use to quickly build their own unique community presence and push that presence out to their partners in the community.

When will other products be as responsive?

jledgard — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:57:00 GMT

Here is a mail from one of my blog readers about our responsiveness during Whidbey. I'm hoping that our product groups will be just as, if not more, responsive during Orcas. Want to know how to increase your teams customer sat...

-----Original Message-----
From: <snip>
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 11:11 AM
To: Josh Ledgard
Subject: (scooblog by josh ledgard) : Ten Insane Ideas for Microsoft
Importance: High

Hi,

I just read your post about ideas for Microsoft. I'm one of your customers and I've been using VS2005 since Beta 2. During the CTP process it was very beneficial to see what bugs had already been reported and what the MS response was to them. The fact that you took time commenting the bugs I reported made me feel that there are someone that really cares. I love it and hope other products will do things similar.

The importance of setting good examples

jledgard — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 22:16:00 GMT

http://teamsystemrocks.com/blogs/mickey_gousset/archive/2006/01/06/590.aspx

Given that, I shot an email off to Soma expressing my appreciation, but I didn't necessarily expect to hear back right way, if at all.

And now comes the part where I say Microsoft is becoming more open. I received a response back within 5 hours of when I sent it. Now it wasn't a book or anything, but it was a personalized response, and not just a "thanks" with nothing else in the body of the message. He took the time to respond back to someone he didn't even know. I find that very refreshing. And I find it indicative of how Microsoft is striving to become more open and communicative.

There are still a lot of MSFT employees who fear that posting their e-mail address publicly is a dangerous game. I'd like to thank Soma for setting consistent good examples for employees in his organization. There are simply no good reasons to not include customers into every part of our product cycles.

Good Feedback on VS 2005 Documentation

jledgard — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 22:51:00 GMT

[Via Mickey]

If you have installed Visual Studio 2005, and have not checked out the documentation included with it, then you need to. Go to:

Start->All Programs->Microsoft Visual Studio 2005->Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Documentation

This new documentation app has a couple of cool features, and a couple of bugs that still need to be worked out. By far, the coolest feature is the Search. When you do a search for a topic, it searchs your local copy of the documentation. But it also searches MSDN Online, the Codezone community, and the MSDN Forums. Here is a screenshot:

When you select a section, such as the MSDN Forums (referred to as Questions in the Documentation, for some reason), it actually returns a snippet of each post, enabling you to quickly determine if the post is relevant, and if you want to click-thru to the forums. This is also true for MSDN Online and the Codezone community. I have found this to be extremely useful.

It's great to see some good feedback on our new search and VS help features.

10 Reasons to Love Microsoft

jledgard — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:09:00 GMT

I read a lot of the Weblogs, Inc Network content. Its just good stuff and they hire good bloggers. Amongst all the hatred you experience as a Microsoft employee it's nice to see a post more in line with the holiday spirit. Though the comments aren't as nice as the post... at least the post was positive.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/12/02/ten-things-we-love-about-microsoft/

3. We love Microsoft's recent openness. So many Microsoft employees write blogs. Whether it is an astute marketing ploy or not is yet to be determined, but hearing from the likes of Omar Shahine and Chris Pratley is a good thing. The spread of blogging throughout Microsoft has added a humanizing quality to the company that you can't imagine coming from other tech behemoths like IBM or (especially) Apple.

4. We love Microsoft's remarkable agility in the marketplace. Microsoft is huge, and should, by definition, be slow. While some may argue they are actually slow to move, we are hard-pressed to find a better example of a mega-company adapting, and ultimately, dominating its space like Microsoft. Some companies talk a big game (yes, Scott McNealy, everyone is staring at you right now) while their core market implodes; Microsoft has, so far, avoided this collapse.

Rob Caron Attempts to Define Community

jledgard — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:29:00 GMT

I have a lot of respect for everything that Rob and the Team System crew has accomplished top to bottom in the "Community Space". In his most recent blog post Rob attempts to define what he considers the community space, the impact its had on our releases, and how our transparency has helped eliminate the FUD surrounding a 1.0 product. Worth reading. I particularly liked the quotes below and the line in bold is something that should be repeated to everyone building a product until they hear it in their sleep.

http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2005/08/11/450663.aspx

"...Now, the Team System body of knowledge is where I concern myself the most. As I noted above, the core purpose of a technical community is to develop knowledge about the domain and share it with community members. The greatest service a product team can do for its community is to impart as much of their knowledge of the product as possible. This happens in a variety of ways: documentation, seminars, Webcasts, blogs, conferences, books, magazines, technical articles, white papers, forum & newsgroup participation, chats, and the list goes on..."

"...A community clouded in FUD is an unhealthy community. If the FUD doesn’t dissipate, the community will. Shipping the knowledge is just as important as shipping the product. Unlike the product, shipping knowledge is an ongoing effort. This is why Microsoft needs to care about its communities. This is why I care about the Team System community."

Cross Posted Top MSDN Forum Users and Forums for June

jledgard — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:39:00 GMT

This is cross posted from the announcement on the MSDN Forums I just made.

Who's posted the most replies marked as answers from the end of May to June? Who are the domain experts? Here is the June view of top forum users!

In June (5/20-6/30)

Top Answerers Across the MSDN forums are...
David M. Kean              170
durstin                        76
Vikram                         60
Keith Thomson              59
Joe Stegman                57
Nikola Dudar                 53
RonaldLaeremans          48
rgerbig                        31
Buck Hodges                29
Luke Hoban                  29
Bruce Taimana MSFT     29

The most helpful list looks largely the same so I've omitted it this time around. David takes the top spot again, but is joined by newcomer durstin in second. It should be noted that ALL of his answers came from the world of windows forms where he earned the top spot. Here are some more of the domain experts from June!

Windows Forms Top 3
durstin           76
Joe Stegman   57
David M. Kean 38

Visual Studio Team System Top 3
Buck Hodges                29
Bruce Taimana MSFT     29
Rob Caron MSFT           23

SQL Top 3 + 1
Euan Garden     27
David Sceppa    23
Brian Welcker    23
Robert Bruckner 23

VB Top 3
Keith Thomson 59
David M. Kean   22
Johan Stenberg 10

VC++ Top 3
Nikola Dudar         52
RonaldLaeremans 46
Jonathan Caves    21

VC# Top 3
David M. Kean  21
Vijaye Raji        8
Vikram              8

Device Development Top 3
Vladimir Fedorov 22
CarlBrochu          21
David T So          15

Thanks to everyone contributing their time to answer questions and tag answers! Remember that if you want to get credit for your answers remind the asker to click "mark as correct answer" on your replies.

Top 10 Forums (All Time) by Answer Rate
Kudos to the teams and answerers that have made these forums very successful!
Forum*                                              Answer%         Days to Answer
Visual J# General                               100%               4.2
Visual Studio Class Designer                 100%               0.7
SQL Server Documentation                  100%               4.3
Visual Studio Team System Workshop    100%               2.8
VSTS General                                     99%               3.3
Visual Foxpro General                           99%               2.3
XML and the .NET Framework                98%               4.8
VSTS Team Developer                          98%               1.5
VSTS Team Test                                 97%               1.8
Visual Studio Source Control                  95%               2.5

Bottom 10 Forums (All Time) by Answer Rate
If you are looking for an opportunity to break into the top users list then you don't have to look very far. Here are the places we could use some help. :-)

Forum*                                              Answer%         Days to Answer
SQL Server Analysis Services                8%                1.5
Web Services                                     22%             10.4
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)          25%              5.2
Visual Basic Language                          30%              1.7
.NET Remoting and Serialization             35%              4.8
Visual Studio Debugger                         36%              5.6
Visual Basic General                             38%              4.1
SQL Server Tools General                      39%              5.2
.NET Development General                     39%             2.3
Windows Forms Clickonce and Deployment 41%            5.1

*Note that I removed forums with very small amounts of traffic.

What this post interesting? What other information would you like to see? Will anyone ever catch David? :-)

Blown Away by our Customers

jledgard — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 20:56:00 GMT

I haven't yet figured out exactly why certain posts become more popular than others. I never really expected much of a response from this. I cross posted it over at Channel9 because the customer creativity there that inspired me to open up our teams internal logo competition in the first place. Now its almost three days later and I've been blown away. I've got a lot of swag to start mailing. To date there have been...

Over four thousand thread views
120+ replies
And over 70 potential logos!!!

I'll probably going to have to limit each person to submitting only their 2 favorite entries. I honestly never thought I'd have to figure out a way to narrow down the submissions. I thought I'd be lucky to get around 10 entries. A small example, but it really starts to prove the supposition made by Nick White today.

"It's my belief that strategically creating, maintaining and deepening relationships with our customers, listening to their concerns regarding our current products while also finding ways to manifest their future needs in upcoming product revisions, and engaging our entire staff in communications with these customers, will vastly improve the quality and market reception of our products. It will also serve to change much of the prevailing attitudes toward Microsoft, especially those that hold that we're a company that does not innovate nor listen to its customers. The strategy is solid and we're well positioned to make it successful. As I mentioned before, the proof comes down to our ability to execute."

I don't know about threatening the open source phenomenon. I believe thats here to stay. But I'll agree that customer led innovation is a powerful tool thats currently underexploited by almost everyone.

Another Believer: "Microsoft Does Listen"

jledgard — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 18:34:00 GMT

Thanks to Rob Caron, who forwarded this to me.

Via Jeff Putz

In a post from Tom Arnold, PM and ninja for VSTS Test, he says in response to my post that the stuff I didn't like about the testing stuff will be fixed in beta 2. Rock on. That's good news. In particular I hope that they deal with the clickable trace output. That would be sweet.

See, Microsoft does listen. For all the crap MS catches about being arrogant or monopolistic or whatever, I tend to think they're humble and want to build products that customers actually want. I've read nonsense about how all this tool integration is designed to give the company a "stranglehold" on the market and lock people in or something like that, and I find that outright stupid. Put aside the fact that Microsoft is not a charity, but it behooves them to build stuff people want. How crazy is that?

Visual Studio Hacks Book

jledgard — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 19:56:00 GMT

Today James Avery announced that his book, Visual Studio Hacks, will be published by O'Reilly and available in February or March.

"I can finally announce the book I have been working on for so long. The book is called Visual Studio Hacks and is being published by O'Reilly. You are probably familiar with the hacks series of books by now, but if not they are a collection of 100 different tips, tricks, or tools. For this book that includes everything from how to get the most out of Intellisense to identifying various add-ins that enrich the Visual Studio experience. The book can already be pre-ordered on Amazon, but it wont be out for a couple months. (Amazon say end of Feb, but my bet is March) "

I've had an opportunity to help James by reviewing some of the chapters. I assume I was picked because I was the IDE test lead for a while and also led an effort to publish some of my own Powertoys/Hacks. I was unfortunately not able to contribute a forward to the book, and I'll likely regret that since I think the book will be fantastic. It is a great practical companion to the more "How To" focused books like "Inside Microsoft Visual Studio". I wasn't the only one who contributed from MS. I only hope we were helpfull...

"I worked alot with folks from Microsoft, and plan about blogging about that too. (Josh Ledgard is the man)" - No problem James!. :-)

The book also proved something I already believed having run the Powertoys blog for a while. There is a great community of people out there dedicated to improving and extending the Visual Studio platform. Some of them are VSIP partners, but many of them are simply regular developers who have an itch to create a tool or feature that didn't exist yet. Internally I describe this community as having the ability to transform VS into a "living application" and a few of them get some much needed recognition through this book. As James says:

"One of the biggest surprises for me while writing this book was the incredible number of great developers and writers who agreed to contribute hacks to this book. Here is a quick list of everyone who contributed to this book..." (read more)

I can't wait to see what sort of companion site he sets up to go along with the book. Great work James!

Hearing Voices

jledgard — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 20:40:00 GMT

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottdockendorf/archive/2005/01/11/350765.aspx

"See, our voices are heard throughout the Microsoft community (and product teams)

Through the MSDN Product Feedback Center, Bob Willer requested debugging support in Unit Tests in Whidbey. Microsoft's response:

Thanks for submitting this. We plan on implementing this feature for the final release of Visual Studio Whidbey Team System.

Andrew Brown "

We Got Your Back: Measuring Success

jledgard — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 20:45:00 GMT

One reason that my team (Developer Division Customer Connection Team) exists is to ultimately raise developer satisfaction. Its our belief that we can effect satisfaction by improving the product group team connections with their customers. Its always hard to measure the short term success of these efforts, but finding posts like this is great subjective fodder that we are on the right path.

"Why is it that Microsoft can command such loyalty that when a new CTP of Whidbey comes out they'll drop everything and install it even on Xmas Eve (besides being a hapless geek)? Why do I Blog and do community service unpaid so much? Here's one good reason. When I got home yesterday from work, there was not one but two Christmas presents from Microsoft. One was a hand-written card from my MVP Lead personally thanking me for my community contributions all year along with a DVD of goodies. The other was a big box from the PAG group GPM Sandy Khaund containing new books "

Recent Developer Community Wins

jledgard — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 20:02:00 GMT

Internally I try and send out mails that recognize cool contributions Microsoft people have made to the community every other month. In the latest issue I wrote a little poem to go with the mail. It's been suggested that I post this to my blog as well. Some of the "Community Wins" are posted to my community wins category, but I didn't keep up well this time around. So here they are in bulk. I apologize for the internal tone of this post, but there wasn't much need to edit what I sent out to a couple thousand people already.

Any hey, if you think someone at Microsoft should be rewarded for their contributions to the community... let me know.

Since it’s the holidays,
There aren’t many here,
But it’s a good time for
Tales of customer cheer.

Through various channels
We did dare to show
A bit of our good work,
So customers would know…

Their bugs are cared for;
Our methods do impress.
Connecting with customers
Makes us all a success.

People are reading,
Transparency’s not a sin.
There’s been lots of chatting,
Time for your community win!

Enjoy,

josh

Chatting Away

Great Chat and a Great Product: The Team System guys recently jumped on the Chat-Wagon and earned several kudos from customers. They also held chats with the MVPs and are going to continue the momentum in January.
- ”I just wanted to say to the VSTS team... Great Job! We're really excited about Team System and look forward to integrating it in our dev shops. These are the types of tools that we've been missing for such a long time.” - “Thanks for the Chat guys. It sounds like VSTS is going to solve a lot of our problems. Happy Holidays to all.” - “This chat has been great! Any plans to have more in the near future?”- “Yes. Great great chat and great product. Definitely it would be good to have more chats like this.” - “There was a lot of great dialog and MS was open to all questions (Bravo!). More Info
MVP Leadership Chats: MVPs are now getting an opportunity to chat monthly with Devdiv PUMs and other leaders. Recent volunteers have included Soma, Craigsy, RickLa and RobertCo. Scottwi and Davidtr are next!

Living-La-Vida Ladybug

Customer Bug Bashing: The Winforms team started the “Smart Client Bug Reporting Challenge” to encourage customer involvement in our CTPs and Beta drops. “…Each month we will hand out 1 backpack and 3 T-shirts for the top 4 bug finders. Come back and enter as often as you have a bug. Why are we doing this, you ask? When we looked at the bug stats filed by the community through the Feedback Center, we found that over 30% of code defect bugs submitted were being fixed in the product. This is a really high number when you remember that the builds the community have are not the most up-to-date ones that the team has (e.g. another 30% are not repro by our team—meaning that we already fixed it by the time that the bug came in). We wanted a way to say "thank you" to all the people who have been finding the great bugs in the product that we are fixing, so we came up with this contest."
Bug of the Week: Mhagman kicked off the “Bug of the Week” award program where customers can win for posting popular bugs, “Best MS Blooper”, “Hardest Repro”, and for having an “Eagle Eye”. Here is a quote from one of the fist award winners: ”It is an honor to be selected for the award. I am very excited for Whidbey and actively try to participate to make it better in whatever way that I can, however small that may be.” More Info
If only there was Ladybug for Windows: “But in fact Microsoft does listen pretty hard, and luckily things are getting even better. Since some time the Whidbey bug database is online at MSDN. Now there are some vids up on Channel9 talking about the database in general and an other one showing how bugs are triaged. Now, having the same thing for Windows, that would be my personal dream. “ More Info

Notes from the Blogosphere

Myth: There is no Community Support for MS Products: “I have had more help from Microsofts forums and newgroups and Microsoft related chatrooms than I ever had with Linux. I had to learn Linux and UNIX by myself, I had very little to no help at all. In Linux chatrooms I was called a "noob" and put on ignore, in forums and news groups I was ignored. Which makes me think, Why did I even bother with Linux?” More MS Myths from this customer
Customers glimpse of bug triage: “Scoble and the rest of the Channel 9 people got invited to a bug triage meeting and got video of the whole thing. Now I'm not a developer so I have no clue what was going on there but damn if it wasn't interesting. Just seeing how these people work is exciting since I am, after all, a total Microsoft whore. I'll be watching more of these Channel 9 things in the near future.” (More Info) see also “Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger Scoble has an excellent video on a "bug triage" session at Microsoft which is very interesting as it shows sort of the process on how bugs get sorted and prioritized in Microsoft's software development.”
More Readers: Bloggers and blog readership are still increasing on blogs.msdn.com. Five of the top ten blogs on MSDN (November Web Views) should be getting this mail because they came from DevDiv teams! Congrats to craigs, cyrusn, brianjo, jaybaz, and the powertoys blog!

Other Notes

Devdiv updates on Channel9: On this page you’ll see highlights from all of our teams as we progress through the development cycle, see the most recent entries from the Release Team blogs, and more videos that give a better look inside our world that we have in the works for the site. If your team would like to do a “video status report”, a tour of your team, filmed code review, or help out in other ways let me know. “YAG points to the new Developer Division Update on Channel 9 that gives a GREAT overview of the state of development on VS 2005. Very cool!” (Link)
Taking the Plunge: Several people have taken the channel9 plunge over the last few months, but I wanted to call out Ori for doing a great job giving some demo’s and taking people on a tour of the VSD team that was very compelling.
MVPs Coming to Town: For a recent all-hands meeting, the CLR team invited a C# MVP (Cathi Gero) to come and present to the team the real external customer experience. Cathi presented on .NET advantages, customer deployment scenarios .NET opportunities for the future versions, and as a community influencer what about VS 2005 really excites her & the community. While this was a great opportunity for the teams to hear an external customer, it was an even better opportunity for the MVP to connect with Microsoft and understand our passion better. If you are interested in inviting a customer to your next team meeting to present the customer view, MVPs are a very good bet.
November CTP Reactions: These are just starting to come in. You can check out this thread for some initial thoughts from customers about our latest release and you can, of course, subscribe to the feedster search to see more posts as the come.

Enter to Win the Bug of the Week Award

jledgard — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 05:35:00 GMT

I took some heat before for suggesting that people should file their bugs against the VS Betas on the Feedback Center as part of the Smart Client bug reporting challenge. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment because I'm going to link the our ongoing "Bug of the Week" competition that kicked off last week. I'll be there is more to come... and I'll link to that as well.