We > Me: Joe Morel's Blog : Microsoft

Traveling to Online Community Unconference 2007

joemorel — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:36:48 GMT

Tomorrow I will be attending the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View, CA. It's been a little bit over a year since the last time I attended this conference, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not people's focus has changed over the past year. Last year most of the topics revolved around two themes:

How do I measure my ROI (return on investment) in my online community so I can justify my existence to my management?
How do I design a reputation system in my online community that makes my community more "sticky" but not necessarily ultra-competitive?

I was very interested in reputation a year ago, and it remains something that I think is of paramount important. As a corollary to that, I'm also very interested how to give the community the power to solve their own disputes and quarrels. I've recently been in the middle of a few online mud-slinging sessions. They are ugly and take away from the focus of the community. The way they are currently "resolved" is through emails directly to me. Ugh--that breaks down pretty quickly...I can't respond to all of the mails, it's not really my business, and frankly, I'm not going to be the point contact for the MSDN Forums forever.

From this conference, I'm going to try to get some "best practices" from other community managers on how they deal with this all-too-common occurrence. If anybody else reading is attending and wants to chat, get a beer, dinner, or whatever, let me know!

And, now, off to SeaTac!

Report a Bug to Microsoft...in the forums

joemorel — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 01:27:00 GMT

As part of the larger group of feature improvements in forums that includes the reputation changes that I blogged about earlier, we're also adding in something that people have been asking about for awhile--product feedback and bug reporting.

The idea is simple. If you've ever used Microsoft's Connect site (http://connect.microsoft.com) or the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you get the concept. If you find a bug in Visual Studio or the .NET framework, you can file a bug that actually gets opened in our internal bug database. We have goals around fixing these customer reported bugs, and you are notified if your bug is accepted and when it is fixed. Simple enough, right?

Well, yes, it really is, but the problem so far is that the product feedback site has been completely separate from our online question and answer site, meaning you needed two separate accounts--one to ask questions and the other to file bugs. We also couldn't move bugs from the forums into the bug database or questions out of the bug site and into the forums. It was a sub-optimal experience for everybody involved.

With the next service pack of the forums, this will all be history. We will be adding two new "thread types" to the forums: bug and suggestion. When you select either of these, helper text will automatically be added to the text editor, asking for your operating system, product version, and repro steps for your bug. When you post your bug, other users will be able to comment on it, "vote" for it, and suggest workarounds for the bug.

At the same time, the bug will be sent to a product support analyst who will route the bug into the correct team's database and attempt to reproduce the bug you reported. If everything checks out and it was a valid bug, it will be forwarded to the correct product team. You can keep updated on the current status of your bug right on the thread page.

The concept isn't new--we've been using a system like this for a couple of years now in Developer Division, but this is the first time that the forums will act as a "one-stop shop" for both Q&A and bug reporting.

Microsoft Popfly - Why I'm Excited

joemorel — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:48:50 GMT

Popfly has been out for about a week now, and I'm excited about it. Why? Is it because I've seen the site evolve internally over the past few months? Is it because it's the first "real" application I've seen that really shows off the power of Silverlight? Is it because I can finally create that umpteenth Twitter-vision clone I've been dreaming about? Well, maybe, but I'm also proud in a way...it's one of the first Microsoft products that has shipped that has a teeny bit of code that I wrote in it. I wrote the Stock Quote block. I also wrote another block, not to be named, but for some reason it didn't make it in the final version. So what if all the block is is a little Javascript wrapper over the MSN money website? It's *my* wrapper. :)

Oh, if you don't have an invite yet, I'm sorry to say that I've already given mine out as graduation gifts (one to my Comp Sci roommate from CWRU, Evan Perry, who just graduated with his J.D., and two to former intern and soon to be full-time Microsoftie Matt Manela, who just graduated with his B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Math...congratulations to you both!)

If you haven't read anything yet about Popfly, I'd suggest starting with John Montgomery's blog and working your way out from there. Here's a great post where he recaps all of the recent press coverage.

Finally, congratulations to the Popfly team--it's a great site, it's *fun* to use, and I only see it getting better from here. I still want to know what happened to the other block I wrote... :)

The Role of Microsoft Employees in our Forums

joemorel — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:21:39 GMT

Recently, a forum moderator asked for some clarification from me in the moderators forum, and I'd like to respond to his question publicly. His post was quite eloquent and long, but his question could be summed up with:

Why are there tons of Microsoft employees in certain technology forums and none in others? Why are the product support technicians only in particular areas, while other forums suffer with even lower answer rates?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and try to answer this in the most transparent way I can. Here's the answer:

Role of Product Support Technicians

Yes, we have started a team in our product support group that is tasked to just help out on the forums. Unfortunately, we only have the headcount and expertise on that team to cover the "major" technology areas--things like the programming languages (C#, VB) and UI technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms). They are hiring for some of the other forums, but we can't hire for every possible forum we are creating (we're still nearly at one new forum a week!)

Developer Division Forums v. Others

Developer Division has a formal commitment around the health and quality of the forums. I personally send out biweekly status mails and do whatever I can to try and bring teams that aren't answering questions in the forums back into the fold. Forums that aren't owned by Developer Division teams don't get that "stick" approach, and my team doesn't always have enough cross-divisional muscle to make sure they are participating. Sometimes they are great, sometimes they are not so great. And, once again, the product support technicians are currently only concentrating on the Developer Division forums with the highest volume of questions right now.

Product Cycles

This is the hardest one. Different teams go "heads-down" at different times as they push to make a release. Sometimes things are sane, and teams have the bandwidth to spend a few minutes in the forums every day answering questions. If things get a little bit nuts, well, they might not think about the forums for a few weeks. It's lousy, but it's a reality that we've all dealt with from time to time--sometimes you're so swamped that it's everything you can do to just keep your head above water.

Who's Rated the "Most Helpful" in the forums?

joemorel — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:44:00 GMT

A little bit ago, I started talking about ways that we could measure the success of the community without using pure "answer count" as the only barometer for community health. I decided to do a little bit of data mining today and looked for the people who have received the highest number of "Helpful Votes" over the past three months. Below that is the chart of the top answerers over the same time period.

Top Helpful Rated List:

User Name	Total Votes	Who is it?
nobugz	404	MVP
Ilya Tumanov	202	Microsoft
DMan1	192	MVP
Shawn Hargreaves - MSFT	184	Microsoft
Figo Fei - MSFT	168	Microsoft Support
Cindy Meister	164	MVP
Zhi-Xin Ye - MSFT	147	Microsoft Support
einaros	139	Community
Jay_Vora_b4843e	135	Community
Jens K. Suessmeyer	132	MVP
Bruno Yu - MSFT	129	Microsoft Support
Jim Perry	125	MVP
Arnie Rowland	124	Community
Phil Brammer	122	MVP
TilakGopi	122	Community
Mike Danes	114	MVP
Dave299	113	Community
ahmedilyas	111	Community
Bite Qiu - MSFT	106	Microsoft Support
Andreas Johansson	106	MVP
Dick Donny	101	Community
Peter Ritchie	90	MVP
ReneeC	90	Community
Richard Berg MSFT	88	Microsoft
nogChoco	85	Community

Top Answerers List:

User Name	Total Answers	Who is It?
nobugz	886	MVP
Bruno Yu - MSFT	682	Microsoft Support
Figo Fei - MSFT	672	Microsoft Support
Zhi-Xin Ye - MSFT	501	Microsoft Support
DMan1	444	MVP
Ilya Tumanov	432	Microsoft
Cindy Meister	405	MVP
Arnie Rowland	382	Community
Bite Qiu - MSFT	361	Microsoft Support
Andreas Johansson	339	MVP
ahmedilyas	307	Community
James Manning - MSFT	281	Microsoft
LesterLobo - MSFT	272	Microsoft
Tom Lake - MSFT	268	Microsoft
ReneeC	264	Community
Jens K. Suessmeyer	261	MVP
Richard Berg MSFT	259	Microsoft
Damien Watkins - MSFT	254	Microsoft
einaros	246	Community
TilakGopi	238	Community
Dick Donny	234	Community
Gavin Jin - MSFT	232	Microsoft Support
Simple Samples	212	Community
Shawn Hargreaves - MSFT	198	Microsoft
Bob zhu - MSFT	187	Microsoft Support

Off-Topic Posts: What To Do With Them

joemorel — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:23:00 GMT

Last Edited: 4/10/2007

There has been much discussion on what to do with off-topic posts, especially in the moderators forum. I've gotten a request to make an executive decision and stick with it, for here on forth, here is the official Microsoft guidance on how to deal with off-topic posts in the forums:

If the question is simply in the wrong forum, move the post to the correct forum.
If the question could be answered in the newsgroups, reply to the thread with a link to the newsgroup where the question will be answered.
Move the thread to the new "Off-Topic Posts" forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1494&SiteID=1
If you don't know the appropriate newsgroup or forum but you're sure it needs to be moved, move the post to the "Where's the Forum For?" forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=881&SiteID=1

This method will ensure that:

Search results do not become polluted with "answered" questions that aren't actually answered.
Reputation and answer rankings are not skewed by housekeeping/answering off-topic posts.
People who asked off-topic questions will still be able to view the reply to their questions. (When a post is deleted, it's no longer visible.)

It is no longer necessary to mark off-topic replies as answers. Please do not do it anymore.

Sounding Off: Feedback from the Forum Moderators

joemorel — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 01:02:00 GMT

Last Edited: 4/6/2007 [I'll be amending the lists in this post based on the comments and continual feedback that comes in. Thanks for hanging with me here.]

We've recently released a service pack for the forums that have changed some functionality in the forums. It's the first batch of noticeable, user-facing changes in the forums in over a year, so it's not surprising that some of the changes have caused some problems. These problems, however annoying, have also spurred some very interesting threads in the MSDN Moderators Forum, a private forum that's the "coffee lounge" for our community moderators to hang out and discuss issues in the forums.

I thought it might be interesting to summarize some of the discussion here and see if we can spur some more constructive input. I'm going to summarize what I've been hearing into three sections. For the "bad" and "ideas" categories, I'm going to try and break them out into individual blog entries.

The Good

Code Snippet Blocks - I'm glad that there's something in the forums now that will protect my code from being "emoticon-ized"...woohoo!
Graphs/Stats of Forums Progress - Josh shared some internal information about forums on his blog recently...it's information that I see everyday, but the community doesn't get to. I got the feedback that we should share it more often.
???

The Bad

Transparency about Support - We've recently started having a new product support team answering questions on the forums, with the goal of getting the answer rates up to "healthy" levels. We really haven't been good at communicating this to any of the moderators in the forums. As a result, there's a huge amount of confusion as to the role of the support people compared to the role of the moderators in the forums. It's a problem, especially because the support technicians aren't aware of the culture and process that the moderators have painstakingly created over the past two years.
Can't Find the Answer Box - This one has actually been brought up both internally and by the community. The "Can't Find the Answer?" box that's next to a forum isn't time scoped. Because these questions are essentially the most viewed questions in the forum, they are old and outdated. The easy resolution--only display questions asked in the past three months here. Of course, there are posts that are older than three months that could still be very useful to people. What's the best solution for the most people?
Top Answerer List - The "Top Answerer" list on the forums doesn't measure quality. (I blogged a bit about this yesterday.) It drives people to answer too quickly, and people can inflate their stats easily by just doing housekeeping stuff--not by answering difficult questions. If reputation is important to a community, then this is not the right solution.
Code Snippet Quirkiness - The code snippet handling just isn't where it should be in a technical support forum. Emoticons render still in one-liner snippets that aren't in a code snippet boxes. The general quote here would be: "C'mon Microsoft! These are developer forums...get it together!"
No Permalinking to Individual Posts in a Thread - There's no way to link to an individual post in a thread--it makes it hard to link to a particular answer. (Note: there are indexes available on the page that can be used.)
RSS Feeds Keep Sticky Posts at the Top of the Feed - And they don't currently include replies. These should both be fixed in "SP4", which should be released at some point in April.

The Ideas

Mark as Resolved with a Reason - Instead of the "Mark as Answer" button, why not make it "Mark as Resolved" and then offer a list of reasons that a user could pick from. "Mark as Answer" is being used even when the question isn't truly answered...just to drive up answer rates or get the "Top Answerer" credit. (Personally, I love this idea.)
Label the Moderators - Who is a moderator on the forums? Right now, I'm not sure. Almost all forum platforms have moderator labeling, but ours doesn't. Let's label the moderators.
Rewards? Recognition? - We really haven't done much beyond the "Top Answerers" list in the forums for recognition or reputation. We need to start moving in that direction...today. (And yes, I've been pushing for this for over a year now. Want proof? Check out my blog category about reputation.)
Are the Metrics Right? - Once again...I blogged about this yesterday. The answer rate metrics are great...they are measurable, and in general, a high answer rate really does mean that people are getting answers to their questions in that forum. But is that really the *best* way to measure things?
Volume *Might* Cause Problems - I was recently very happy to see the 1,000,000th post in the forums. Of course, I also have the theory that more eyeballs = more posts = more answers, and everything scales very well. This isn't necessarily so. The moderators are starting to get overwhelmed with the number of questions coming in...we should be careful on how quickly we drive more and more traffic to the forums.

Let's talk and make a list. What's good/bad/or just a good idea?

What is a "Healthy" Online Community?

joemorel — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 01:25:00 GMT

For over year, we've been measuring a few key metrics in the MSDN Forums to monitor overall forum health. We track them aggressively, send out biweekly mails about them, and use them as guideposts to make decisions about what we should or should not do with regard to the forums. For example, our basic "reputation system" of having the top answerer lists in the forums is directly based on our desire to raise the overall "answer rate" of the forums.

Here are the key metrics we are currently watching:

Monthly Question Volume - How many questions are being asked in the forums? Is it raising or falling? How quickly is this number changing?
2 Day Answer Rate (Goal: 60%) - What percentage of questions are answered within 48 hours of first being asked? This is our primary metric. Think about it...if you were asking a question on the site and it wasn't answered within 48 hours, would the answer be of great use to you? (DevDiv is currently at
7 Day Answer Rate (Goal: 80%) - If the question isn't get answered right away, are we at least being helpful in the long run to most of the people who are answering questions on the forums?

That's pretty much it. Our real goals on the forums (so far) have been primarily based on the number of questions that get marked as an answer. There have been problems with this approach.

No Quality Measures - Ugh...the old quantity vs. quality debate. We're measuring the amounts of questions that get the little "answer" flag...but how many of those questions are answered with a good answer? How many are just off-topic questions with the answer being "ask the question somewhere else"? There's no true quality measures built into the system.
Over-incenting crazy-fast answering - Along the same vein, this drive towards answer rates (and the Top Answerer lists on the live site) have drove some overly fast answers and answerers. By not measuring quality, why not just go as fast as you can through the questions?
Comparing Percentages is Comparing Apples to Oranges - Is it fair that I send out a report that compares the health of the VB forums to the health of the forums for a much smaller team? Probably not. There are order-of-magnitude differences from forum to forum. If a given forum gets 3 questions a week, 2 of which get answered, is it healthier than a forum that gets 90 questions a week but only 53 got answered?
Living and Dying By the "Mark as Answer" Button - We really depend on moderators and product teams to do all of the answer marking. I love the "mark as answer" feature in the forums, but the implementation forces us to depend on people actually marking things. Not everything gets marked, and not everything gets unmarked when it should. It's an explicit action, and let's face it--people are lazy. Why should we believe that anybody is going to go out of their way to just mark some as answered? Aren't their other metrics we could be tracking?

I'd like to follow-up this post with some new proposed metrics I've been thinking of, but I'd like to kick off the discussion without tainting it (or making this post any longer...)

If you had to track just two or three numbers to monitor the health of an online community, what would you track?

Can We "Digg" Forums?

joemorel — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:43:00 GMT

When at a loss for what you might want to blog about, go to Digg.com...and voila--the top entry on the page was about a new site that's using Web 2.0 online community concepts to bubble up the best technical pieces of content to other devs.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/03/tweako_a_social.html

The site is called "Tweako", and the idea is to use a Digg-like interface to elevate the most interesting pieces of content to the top. A simple idea, but as Digg has shown, the concept works fairly well.

This got me to thinking...how could this be applied to community discussion sites, like the MSDN Forums? I've toyed with the idea of "Digging" individual users to create reputation, but never ordering the content based on votes. What would this look like? Would it work?

I've always thought that there really are two different types of users that are going to the forums--people who want to participate in the discussion and people who just want to search and read the discussions. Looking at our server logs, 99% of the people who go to the forums never even register, much less post content.

Given this, two different views make sense--the standard, chronological interface for users that want to participate in forums the way they always have, and a new, Digg-style interface for the browsers.

The Digg-style interface would bubble up the *best* posts by forum. The voting could also go into search relevancy, making sure that the best threads show up first. It'd also be a great feed to expose on the MSDN Developer Centers for given technologies.

Just my thoughts for a Friday...

Forums SP3 Deployed - Paste Code Snippets in the Forums

joemorel — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:40:26 GMT

I've gotten the message so many times it's ridiculous--the MSDN Forums display emoticons in the middle of code snippets. Nothing, I mean nothing, will make a developer more mad than a cutesy little light bulb rendering in the middle of their carefully constructed code snippet that they made in the forums. (Apparently "[i]" is shorthand for light bulb in emoticon-speak...who knew?)

I'm happy to say that the forums team successfully deployed a fix for this (and a bunch of other bugs) today. The release is officially called "Service Pack 3", but to me, it's an important milestone. SP3 is the first release from the forums team that includes code and fixes that were contributed by my team. If you enjoy the editor fixes, you can thank Kannan, who stayed up many late nights making this work.

Another noteworthy addition to the forums is the new "Code Snippet" button. Basically, this button will mark a block of code that you might have typed or copy/pasted from Visual Studio. Here's a screenshot:

Note: if you're a Firefox user, I've been told that you should clear your cache to properly view the site.

Thanks again to everybody: (Ji Zhang and entire ATC team, Alan Griver for getting us code access, Penny Parks and Lisa Ambler for politely answering all of my pushy emails, and most of all Kannan and John on my team for their tireless effort making these fixes happen.)

What Was the One Millionth Post in the Forums?

joemorel — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 01:16:45 GMT

James asked a good question in the comments section of my last blog post, and I thought the topic might be a fun blog post to end a Friday on. What exactly was the one millionth post?

Well, the one millionth post on the MSDN Forums was the fifth post in a thread entitled "Results to row instead of column" in the Transact-SQL forum. The post was made by the user Sami Samir Ibrahim who joined the site on March 12th and has contributed nine posts so far.

Here it is...the text of the 1,000,000th MSDN Forums post...yet another answer from a user that enjoys helping other people:

Well, here is a solution although not a really very user firendly one. The idea is first to create a query that contains the row ID. If you are using SQL Server 2005 then you can use the Row_Number() function. If not, then the only way I could think of was to create a temp table with an identity field. After that you need to join the same result set together but with incrementing IDs. Meaning join ID 1 in the first result set with ID 2 in the second one and then join this result set with ID 3 in the 3rd one. Told you it was not a very user friendly answer :)
For SQL Server 2005 the query will be:
Select Top 1 A.[FirstName] + ', ' + B.[FirstName] + ', ' + C.[FirstName]
From (Select Row_Number() Over (order by [FirstName]) as RowID, [FirstName] From [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Contact]) A
Inner Join (Select Row_Number() Over (order by [FirstName]) as RowID, [FirstName] From [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Contact]) B on (A.RowID + 1) = B.RowID
Inner Join (Select Row_Number() Over (order by [FirstName]) as RowID, [FirstName] From [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Contact]) C on (B.RowID + 1) = C.RowID
For SQL Server 2000 it will be:

Create Table #Tmp
(RowID int identity(1,1),
FirstName varchar(256))
Insert Into #Tmp (FirstName)
Select [FirstName] From [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Contact]
Order By [FirstName]
Select Top 1 A.[FirstName] + ', ' + B.[FirstName] + ', ' + C.[FirstName]
From #Tmp A Inner Join #Tmp B on (A.RowID + 1) = B.RowID
Inner Join #Tmp C on (B.RowID + 1) = C.RowID
Drop Table #Tmp
I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Sami Samir

MSDN Forums: 1 Million Posts and Counting!

joemorel — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:50:05 GMT

Today I was doing a little bit of housekeeping on the MSDN Forums and I noticed the post ticker at the bottom of the page...

In case the picture comes through fuzzy--today we broke through 1,000,000 posts on the MSDN Forums, almost exactly two years after they initially launched! And to think, people told Josh that developers weren't going to use web forums... :) Another fun stat for me is that on the day I started, August 1, 2005, there were only 45,065 posts...only 4.5% of the post volume that we have today. Cool.

I've been meaning to pull together a cool post with some statistics I've been pulling together about the forums, but I'll save that for another day. For now, let's just make like a giant McDonald's sign and say MSDN Forums: 1 million posts, ready to be searched and served!

Fixing the Zune in Five Steps?

joemorel — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:46:41 GMT

As you probably know if you follow this blog regularly, I'm a big digital music fan that's been trying to move from iTunes to a Microsoft-based platform for over a year. I bought a Zune right after the Zune's release in November, and I've generally been happy with it.

Today Engadget posted a short piece on five things that would improve the Zune against the iPod. I agree with some of the points in the article, like releasing firmware that fixes the DRM-skipping problem and adding podcasting support, but don't think that the list really does much to help differentiate the Zune from its competitor(s). Here's five things I'd love to see with the Zune (or future Zunes) that would help me recommend it over an iPod to a friend:

Make My Zune Flash-Based and Nano-Sized - Let's face it, very few people really listen to all 30 gigs of music they have. In fact, it's impossible to listen to all of the songs in one day. I remember reading somewhere that the average music collection on an iPod is around 1,000 songs--or about 4 gigs. Apple realized it with the Mini and the Nano--smaller is better. And videos? Really? Do most people really care?
Dump the WiFi...give me Bluetooth - WiFi is a PIA on mobile devices. The only mobile device I've used with great WiFi support is the Nintendo DS, and that's because they have a great input device. Why do I really want to share music with other people on the bus? I really don't want to listen to what the creepy guy that's muttering to himself is listening to. What I would like is wireless headphones and wireless syncing to my computer. Bluetooth 2.0 can give me this. And...wait...you could use Bluetooth to send songs to each other as well.
Push the Subscription Music! - I love subscription music. For $14.99/month, I can listen to over a million songs. I can listen to the new Shins album without buying it or waiting for a radio DJ to select tracks off of it to force feed me. I can listen to that old Steve Winwood song "Valerie" without having to actually spend $0.99 to own it. I can listen to playlists of stuff that I might not like to see if I do. We recently used the Zune client at a birthday party. It was amazing--you could literally cue up everyone's favorite songs. Why we are marketing people squirting songs to each other while they are snowboarding instead of showing them how the Zune offers a seamless subscription experience is beyond me.
Let's Define "Social" Before We Join It - The WiFi sharing is social. Even here in Redmond though, there just aren't enough people to squirt music to. What's truly social though is the Internet. Why not allow people to upload their playlists and ratings to a central "ZuneCenter"? A new, smarter Zune client software could compare your playlists and ratings against thousands of other people, and recommend a playlist. If you have a Zune Pass, this playlist can contain songs you've never even thought about downloading. Every day, a new music experience is synced to your Zune, waiting for you to try music that people like you have implicitly recommended. Now that's social. Maybe you start flagging songs in this playlist. The software might recognize that the songs you are flagging are all from a few discrete people. You can use the Zune software to browse their collections...wow there's a lot of potential here...
SDK - Yes, yes, I know. Microsoft wants to keep the Zune ecosystem "pure". Let's face it though...the Zune software is missing some major pieces that I should be able to download plugins for. Providing an SDK for people to programmatically manipulate the library, create playlists, download songs from the Zune Marketplace, and generally extend the software would enhance the Zune experience much more than it would detract from it. You can't use the iTunes/iPod closed-system example here--iTunes has had an SDK for a long time that have enabled very cool plugins.

What feature do you think the Zune should add to become more competitive, or is Engadget right on?

Takeaways from the MVP Summit

joemorel — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 02:07:31 GMT

Another MVP Summit has come and gone. Maybe it was the fact that I was busy moving the weekend before it started, but wow, it just seemed to fly by! I had the opportunity to meet with some great MVPs that I've been working with in the forums, sit in on the Microsoft.com community team's discussion about forums (thanks Alan!), and attend a few C# community sessions (thanks Charlie!) Here are a few takeaways I got from listening to MVPs talk about community (and online discussion in particular):

Offline Support in Forums Must Happen - Many, many MVPs love NNTP--they've been using newsgroups for over a decade, and they weren't thrilled with my insistence that forums are the wave of the future. Why not? Because MVPs contribute a huge volume of posts to online discussions, and the "click-and-wait" style of our web forums is awful for them to try and be as prolific. I agree. First step: we're fixing the broken RSS feeds in the forums. Longer term: the Microsoft.com Communities Team heard the message loud and clear...I'm hoping there's a real solution for offline support in forums in the future.
Our community channels are disconnected - The MSDN Forums don't integrate with the Developer Centers on MSDN. You have to go to Connect to file a bug and the forums to ask a question. Only Microsofties can have blogs on blogs.msdn.com, but there are MVPs that have blogs on weblogs.asp.net. Channel9 is completely separate from the MSDN Forums. What's going on here? It was clear after hearing this a couple of times that integrating the channels more closely is wanted. We also need to talk more to the other teams doing "community"...
I'll give you feedback...but you better act on it - I'll thank Nick for this feedback. We've asked for feedback on the forums time and time again--for the NNTP sync that we had setup, for a never-really-released offline client solution for the forums, and for the forums themselves. We have done a terrible job looping back with the people who have given up their own time to help us make our products better. If we are going to fix a bug in the forums, we should let people know when and how. If we aren't going to fix the bug, we should say why. Simply saying "thanks for the feedback, we hope to fix this soon" is just a polite way of telling somebody to buzz off. If we expect to build trust in the community, the first step is taking real action on their feedback.

MVP Summit 2007

joemorel — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:39:00 GMT

It's that time again...the MVP Global Summit is happening this week in Seattle and Redmond. The first Summit was one of my favorite experiences so far working at Microsoft--I love talking to customers and hearing it "from the horse's mouth." It's not often that I get to actually meet with people face-to-face, so to actually get to meet the people behind the forum posts and emails is extremely exciting.

That being said...I'd love to meet with any MVPs that are regularly reading this blog. I got the opportunity to meet with Peter, one of our excellent C# forum moderators, earlier today, and I'd love to meet with more of you.

Here's my schedule:

Tuesday: I'm planning on going to the BillG keynote, so I'll probably be hanging around the convention center a bit before lunch and throughout the keynote.

Wednesday: If you're a C# MVP, go to one of Charlie's community sessions. Josh and I will be there. I'm pretty sure most of the people on my team will be checking out the product group dinner that night as well.

Thursday: Another C# community session. I'll probably hang out in the the Microsoft conference center for a few hours and have some "office hours" if anybody wants to chat me up about forums... :)

If you want to chat with me or want to see if I'm around, send me a quick mail to joemorel@microsoft.com. I have a BlackJack...I get my mail right away. :)