MSDN Online Media Blog : MSDN Webcasts Doctrine

Lighter Webcast Registration

scottlum — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:14:00 GMT

We took a small step on removing some of the registration pages from our on-demand webcasts. If you view most of the recent (past two years) on-demand MSDN or TechNet webcasts on our Webcast Series landing page you’ll notice that the number of clicks it takes to view the webcast went down from seven to just three. Our goal will be to get it down to one.

So why’s this taking so long? I was hoping to get this done months ago, but trying to fix the problem within the existing infrastructure has proven to be frustrating and perplexing. This is a temporary workaround as we work on pulling our content onto new servers and building new landing pages that we hope will make finding the content much easier. So if you view the webcasts through some of our other MSDN and TechNet pages, or using the Search box you might still have to go through the standard registration process but it should be fine using this site. I like these series landing pages anyway as the best way to surf our webcast content.

Try it out. Let me know your thoughts…

Webcast Series Landing Page: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/default.mspx

Scott Lum

Somasegar’s Goal: ‘Complete Transparency’

Georgeo Pulikkathara — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 20:18:00 GMT

If you don't know who S. “Soma” Somasegar is, now's a good time to learn more about him. Soma's the corporate vice president of the Microsoft Server & Tools Developer Division. Within Microsoft, Soma has been evangelizing the ideas of complete transparency in how we build our products, run our business, and how our teams run their day to day operations. I’ve been evangelizing this for sometime on our Microsoft webcasts team, but it’s great to hear this from our senior Microsoft leadership, as a way to run our business and build better software for our customers.

You’re going to see a new Microsoft in the next few years. One where we have continuous feedback loops, where we get feedback from the community and act upon it to make the product and experience with Microsoft better for partners and customers. You’re also going to be seeing the Developer Tools division listening even more to what you have to say, and trying to address and fix things that customers want to see fixed.

MSDN Webcasts and MSDN Architecture Webcasts is an attempt to put an human face on Microsoft, what Soma calls Complete Transparency. During the month of April, you’re going to see over a 100 hundred live webcasts where we have the Microsoft product development team, industry experts within and outside Microsoft talk openly and candidly about what you can expect in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. If you get the chance to attend live, I strongly recommend it. Our product development are some of the brightest folks in the business. Here’s your chance to ask them questions, understand why they designed the software they way they did, and give your feedback on what we can fix or improve. Also be sure to check out Somasegar's WebLog

Regards,

George, MSDN Webcasts

Office: 425-707-6912

georgeop@microsoft.com

Technical Support for MSDN Webcasts

Georgeo Pulikkathara — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 18:33:00 GMT

I had a co-worker forward me a voice mail from Dan, one of our viewers today, who had technical issues on our live MSDN Webcasts, and wasn't able to contact us directly. I'm digging into this today to try and find out why we were not able to help Dan resolve his problem. To those who regularly attend our Webcasts, I want to provide this friendly reminder that we offer technical assistance before, during and after the live webcast.

If you're experiencing technical difficulties during a live meeting webcast, turn your seat color red, and you will be contacted by one of our producers in the webcast.

If you have technical questions or need to talk to someone before of after the live webcast, you can reach our technical support staff by accessing the following url www.livemeeting.com/ask.

You can also send us feedback by visiting the Contact Us site and filling out information there. Be sure to include your email address, and the contact us staff will track down an answer for you.

You can also email me directly at georgeop@microsoft.com, or call me at 425-707-6912, and I will listen.

Regards,

George, MSDN Webcasts

Fear of Flying

Georgeo Pulikkathara — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 21:46:00 GMT

This last Friday was the E-learning Expo at Microsoft. It was an internal expo held to evangelize new technologies and ideas among Microsoft Employees engaged driving in E-learning through their jobs.

So I was there along with Randy Choco from the Microsoft Webcasts team to hear what folks where talking about. Matter of fact we were both in the talk by Robert Scoble on blogging and wikis.

I’ve learned some interesting things in Robert Scoble’s talk. The Scobleizer spoke of where Microsoft’s Channel 9 name came from. Hope I got this right. Apparently one of the founder has a fear of flying, and would never fly anywhere to see his customers. It got to the point where his boss told him he had to travel or else. So he’s onboard this plane, and the pilot sees that he’s afraid. So the pilot tells him that when you're flying in the US, there's an onboard radio you can listen to, and when you put it on Channel 9, you can listen to what the pilots are talking about. You're listening to what they're talking about and learn tat that they’re not afraid, so why should you be? Hence the Channel 9 name was born. It’s a great story. I always like hearing what Robert is going to talk about next on his blog.

The reason I bring it up here, is because I’m gonna tell you not to be afraid of Microsoft tools and technologies. MSDN Webcasts is hear to help. Everyday we broadcast 3-4 webcasts live on on the coolest things you can do with Visual Studio.NET and other key developer tools and technologies from Microsoft. Everyday we bring in experts from inside and outside of Microsoft and they’re gonna talk to you about what’s happening with Microsoft tools and technologies.

As you know we’ve got the a huge week around ASP.NET Webcasts taking place from October 18 - 29, 2004 and it’s designed to help you learn all about web development and ASP.NET. In the same fashion we’ve got 64 bit Windows Server coming up in November and Yukon Technical preview week in the first week of December.

January is going to be wicked month, as we’re planning on bringing in IBM and Sun Microsoft Systems to talk about Interoperability. You look skeptical. Don’t be. I’m serious about this. I know how important it is to make everything work in a IT shop. It’s a challenge, and we’re going to co present with IBM and Sun to give you some best practices and highlight solutions that have helped our customers to find their very own developer nirvana.

So don’t be afraid, but rather tune in everyday and listen to the experts presenting on MSDN Webcasts. We’re here to help.

Regards,

George Pulikkathara, MSDN Webcasts

Why I love webcasts

Georgeo Pulikkathara — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 22:14:00 GMT

In 2001, with three more months left to finish my MBA program from University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, I left my job as a Technical Account Manager in Microsoft Premier Enterprise Support in Charlotte, North Carolina to take a job as a product manager on the emarketing initiative team in Redmond, Washington. I had spent the last 11 years deploying and supporting Novell 2.x - 3.11 networks, OS/2, MS Lan Manager - NT4 installations and support. While I enjoyed working as an IT Pro, I wanted to try use my MBA to try some new things, so I was very excited to take this new role. I actually flew from Seattle, Washington back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for the remainder of the classes through the end of August, 2001 until I was I awarded my MBA later in December 2001.

However, I was up here maybe two weeks in May 2001, before I was caught up in the re-org of the day, and ended up in Developer marketing. My new job was now to build marketing kits and marketing collateral for others to market MSDN Events, run an internal newsletter called the US Developer Communiqué and start a webcast program for developers in my spare time. Somehow I didn’t think my new MBA skills were gong to get much use here.

With limited budget, I worked with internal speakers and a company called Interwise to get some live webcasts setup for developers to attend and learn. I looked at the content that was out there and didn't care for it, because it was mostly a sales message; rather than how to actually use the product or addressing a problem. Microsoft had some useful products, but the docmentation was poor, and if you wanted to be proficient in it, you had to figure out on your own how to use it, or spend a week and 2-5 thousand dollars in training. I had them strip out the fluff, and and them to add more code demos. The very first webcast brought in over 800 registrants. No incentives, no cool giveaways, or huge names to present. Steve Kirk, a Microsoft application architect, was presenting a webcast called architecting a .NET application. However we had all kinds of issues in the first six months ranging from firewall issues, VOIP dropping out, application sharing freezing with large numbers of customers attending webcasts at the same time. We got flamed pretty bad for that webcast. Working with platform and infrastructure teams, Interwise, and a host of others, we were able to get the Interwise ECP 4.0 release to work for our brand of technical webcasts with two way VOIP, application sharing, and start to scale out the live MSDN Webcasts from 50 attendees to 1000 live attendees per webcast by December 2001. Libby Mines came on board in March of 2002, and helped to scale us out from 8 webcasts a quarter to 180 webcasts a quarter. We’ve got so many webcasts out there it’s hard to search for a certain topic and or speaker.

I still wanted to take our webcasts to the next level, so I heled put together a proposal for a centralized webcasts team in 2002. My General Manager at that time, Jon Roskill, finally agreed to it and created a new webcasts team under the leadership of a great guy named Marc Tramonte. In Janaury 2003, the Microsoft Webcasts team was born, over the next few months we assembled some of the best talent in and out of Microsoft to take webcasts to the next level. Throughout 2003 and 2004, the Microsoft Webcasts team tackled tough issues that we knew were impacting the webcast customer experience. Nicole Stocker who drives our demand generation engine really extended our awareness and helped to quantify our demand generation activities for Microsoft webcasts. Jennifer Walts has turned into a force of nature on our webcasts team and helped to get webcast network programming and production tools in place to help us make the customer experience more consistent every day. Dean Andrews loves process, and he provided thought leadership to help us get processes in place to scale the program to the next level. You're seeing some cool webcast series and content coming out from us. It's no accident. Content has always been challenging, but we got a great guy named Anthony Tsim on board who really understands the developer tools and technolgies content, and where to get the most knowledgable folks to present. He's also the resident SWAG (Stuff We Always Get) king, and can tell you where all the cool giveaway stuff is coming from inside and outside Microsoft.

Our team is comprised of some of the most talented people I've had the pleasure to work. We work well together and compliment each others strengths and weaknesses, and have performed above my initial expectations. Our whole team works to ensure we're providing value and not B.S. to customers. I’m confident we’ll figure out the best webcasts solution for our customers and keep refining it overtime. We don’t always get the right answer the first time, but we’re persistent and very passionate about doing the right thing for our customers and our business. Even though we produce webcasts, I believe we're in communcations business leveraging webcasts and virtual labs to help communicate the value of Microsoft tools and technologies to our customers.

I've always been passionate about technology. I see technology has an enabler for learning and a way to better our lives in what ever field we work in. I believe technology itself is a fad, but it's constantly evolving to help us do achieve our goals faster and better, be more productive, and better communicators.

I believe webcasts are the next killer app of our century. It can be considered a disruptive technology, and a very effective vehicle for communicating technical information to attendees online (lives or on-demand). Webcasts also have the potential to make our best teachers into the true rock stars that they are, and help students and teachers in disparate locations come together to learn and teach one another. Webcasts have the potential to redefine our lives, and change how we work and live. Imagine a world where you get to buy land in some remote location that you can work from remotely by webcasting in for meetings and being able to collaborate real time with your family, peers and clients. Imagine a world where you children can attend classes taught by the best instructors in the world where ever they are and where ever your children are. You take your instruction online and only go to schools for your exams. Teachers can get paid like the radio talk shows hosts based on ratings and how many students are attending their classes. If they're disruptive online, they get disconnected. Participation is always open to all provided they respect the educator and their fellow classmates.

Some of this is already happening now; some of if because of resources or the subject matter being taught wouldn’t be applicable. We use webcasts to stay in touch with our families with MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, with web cams and the audio capabilities in MSN Messenger. With instant messaging or a live webcast, I can talk to my brother in Houston, Texas or my mom who isn't technical, but understands what it can do for her.

It's only going to get better. Right now, I work on a emarketing team that I believe is going to help others to be better developers, network administrators, database administrators, and technology leaders that are able to make better decisions because they have been able to stay up to date on the latest developer tools and technologies being developed by companies such as Microsoft and other companies in the IT and developer ecosystem.

I do my best to remove the marketing hype and show how the products actually work. Most people outside Microsoft don’t know this, but we have a content review team in place to make sure that marketing fluff stuff doesn’t make it on an MSDN Webcast. If it solves a customer problem, improves productivity, shows best practices on developing, deploying, and supporting developer tools and technologies, then we get it on MSDN Webcasts and MSDN Architecture Webcasts.

I love my work managing MSDN Webcasts and MSDN Architecture Webcasts. I hope you’ll join me on MSDN Webcasts and share my excitement around a better way to learn about developer tools and technologies.

Regards,

Georgeo Pulikkathara, MSDN Webcasts

Microsoft Webcasts RSS feeds are available here

Georgeo Pulikkathara — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 07:12:00 GMT

We've made our webcasts available as a RSS feed on ths blog site. Every month we'll post the upcoming month's webcasts here for MSDN, MSDN Architecture Webcasts including patterns & practices live! webcasts, TechNet, Security, Office Systems, and Microsoft Business Solutions webcasts. Here they are below.

Upcoming MSDN Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming MSDN Architecture Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming Security Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming Microsoft Business Solutions Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming Microsoft Office Systems Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming TechNet Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming Executive Circle Webcasts (rss)

Upcoming Webcasts for the week (rss)

Webcast Series (rss)

MSDN Webcasts Doctrine

Georgeo Pulikkathara — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 11:08:00 GMT

I was looking at channel 9 and realized that I don't have our MSDN Doctrine published. So here it is:

Anyone can attend for free, anytime, from anywhere.
We publish live technical webcasts for public consumption by those interested in developer and software architectural webcast content.
We do not charge for this content. The idea is that you can attend these webcasts for free and learn.
We take questions from our live audience, and do our best to answer them.
We focus on less slides and will show our attendees how the technology works (app sharing, desktop sharing,etc).
We do it more than once daily; sometimes even during lunch and especially after lunch (PST time).
No B.S. We don't push out marketing type content (even though we're in the Microsoft business marketing organization). If someone tries, we take them out back and beat the #&*% out of them.
We do this live and then record it so those who have day jobs can watch them as well as time permits.
We only get the serious subject matter experts to present; where ever they are in the world.
We focus our content so that's it clearly Introductory - Level 100 (you do need to know some code), Intermediate - Level 200 (you can code), Experienced - Level 300( you've been doing code for awhile) , and Advanced - Level 400 (you da man!).
Finally, we love developers!

Regards,

George, MSDN Webcasts