Dear MSDN and TechNet Community Content contributor,

On December 7, 2006, we announced the broad customer availability of the Community Content feature in the MSDN and TechNet online libraries. As you are well aware, this feature allows developers and IT professionals worldwide to contribute code and content in a wiki environment alongside the official Microsoft online documentation.

After two years in existence, I am very pleased to report that this feature has been extended to over 6 million topics of documentation, covering 11 languages, in the MSDN and TechNet online libraries. 

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the contributors who have added community content in the MSDN and TechNet online libraries over the past year. As was the case a year ago, we are rewarding the top 20 most active contributors over the past 12 months with a plaque to commemorate the efforts as well as a small gift. While we have been able to identify the majority of these 20 contributors, we are still trying to connect with the following individuals:

Raymond Kenneth Petry

Stanley Roark

Lee-Tony

If your name appears on this list or the name of someone you know, please contact laurelmc@microsoft.com.

In closing, I want to encourage everyone to continue sharing your expertise by actively contributing code, samples, and best practices directly in our online library and help us make our product documentation as rich and comprehensive as possible.

Fabrice Fonck

GM – Developer Content & International

On Friday, we had our 1 year anniversary of Community Content.  The team would like to thank all the contributors over the past year as we look forward to the next.  We have recently launched the same feature set over on the TechNet Library.  We have SQL Server 2005 and Exchange 2003 docs online now with the feature and more coming.

For some stats and details on upcoming improvements, please check out Soma's blog post from Friday.

If you have questions or feedback, send us a mail @ MSDNWiki feedback. 

Thanks, Clayton
MSDNWiki PM

We just launched an update to the MSDN Library.  As part of the release, a new tags control will show up on library documentation with the Community Content feature (currently 1.5 million pages across 7 languages).  There is a page level tagging control right below the topic content and one added to each Community Content block.  You will see this available on the following documentation:

• Visual Studio 2005
• .NET Development (2.0 & 3.0) 
• SQL Server 2005 Books Online
• Office Solutions Development (Office 2007)
• Win32 and COM Development

How it works
There are two parts to using tagging on the site. The first is adding tags and the second is browsing the tags on the site:

1. Add tags to pages or blocks
• Tagging a page: Navigate to the bottom of the page just above the Community Content header and click "Add a Tag".  Enter a tag or a few that describes the page content and hit "Add". 
• To tag Community Content: Navigate to the block in Community Content and click "Add a Tag" on the control at the bottom of the block. Enter a tag or two that describes the content and hit "Add".  You can also add\remove tags in the inline editor.
  
2. Browse tags to discover content - Click on any tag to see the browse by tags page. This page allows you to define a query based on combinations of different tags from content in the system to refine the results. You can also remove tags as needed to narrow down your result set.

Tag format

• Multiple tags can be entered at one time. Separate each tag with a space.
• Double quotes can be used to make phrases, but all is normalized to just one tag before saving.
• Examples:
• [aspnet code csharp] becomes three tags: "aspnet", "code", "csharp"
• [system.xml C# "sql clr"] become three tags: "system.xml", "c#", "sqlclr"  

Who can add tags?

 Adding tags has the same requirements as the Community Content feature:

• Live ID \ Passport is required
• If you are new, you will have to set a unique display name and agree to the terms of use

Alright, now here are some links to get you started:

• Library home page (tag cloud on right in Community Content box)
• 50 Most Popular Tags
• Community Content Recent Edits RSS (you will see Tags: now in the feed)

Cheers,

Clayton, MSDNWiki PM

We just launched an update to the Community Content feature on the MSDN Library.  We now have localized support for French, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese.  Visual Studio 2005 content for these locales will begin supporting annotations over the next few weeks.  In addition, we have done an overhaul of the inline editor to speed along content creation.  Let us know if you find issues or have a suggestion at our MS Connect site.  Just click on the Feedback link on the left.

Thanks,

Clayton, MSDNWiki PM

Wondering how to track fresh new content into the MSDN Library?  Just subscribe to the following RSS feed:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/Community-Edits(d=rss).aspx

The default feed is scoped over the last 7 days which should feed your aggregator nicely.

Enjoy,

Clayton

MSDNWiki PM

We launched on MSDN Community Content RC0 in early December.  We have had some great feedback and little bit of criticism.  As we are recovering from the holidays and getting back to the grindstone, I wanted to share a few things.

Activity so far

Right now, we are averaging about 10 new contributions a day (over the past 2 months).  Not bad, considering they are pretty good quality by and large.  In case you are interested, there is an RSS feed for our statistics that comes on the MSDN Library home page.  Here it is for the English site -> http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/Community-stats(d=rss).aspx.

Known issues

Biggest pain I see right now is our inline editor.  No cursoring down!  What is that?  Also, we are seeing duplicates in some RSS aggregators.  Well, we are working hard now on these and other high impact issues and will be updating that code along with a move to the RTM of ASP.NET AJAX under the covers later this month.

Please use our MS Connect site to find known issues, post bugs and provide suggestions.  It's not pretty, but this will help us all be more productive.

Thanks,

Clayton, MSDNWiki PM

Earlier this afternoon we pushed an update to the MSDN Wiki site that redirects all English pages on the site to MSDN2.  This is in preparation for our launch of the MSDN Community Content feature on MSDN2 later this week.

 Here are just a few benefits we'll get as a result of the migration of this feature to MSDN2:

• The community content feature will be available on a wider range of topics.  Along with the Visual Studio 2005 content, the Windows SDK managed reference docs will have the community content section when the feature is launched later this week. Many other Microsoft developer doc sets will add the feature over the next few months. 
• The Community Content will be accessible via MSDN search and public search engines.
• The Community Content will be accessible through the VS IDE when you use online help. 

All English contributions to the MSDN Wiki beta site will be migrated and visible on MSDN2. Accounts that were created on the MSDN Wiki beta site will be active and will have the same level of permissions on MSDN2.  

The MSDN Community Content feature will be live on MSDN2 by the end of this week!

-- MollyBos, MSDN Wiki PM

After a brief (relatively speaking…) summer hiatus, the MSDN Wiki blog is back!  Although the blog was on break for the past couple months, the MSDN Wiki project was not, and I have lots of news to share.

New Stuff

·         As Rob Caron reported, we released an update to our English site in late August that fixed some bugs, including our earlier lack of FireFox support.  We also provided some new RSS support; I’ll provide more details about this in a separate post.

·         Yesterday, Somasegar announced our Brazilian Portuguese translation wiki release.  This is our first experiment with a site closer to a “real” wiki, in that people can edit the content directly.  

MSDN Wiki v1 Plans

Overall the community response to MSDN Wiki has been very positive.  Because of this, and also to address several common MSDN Wiki customer requests, we’re in the process of migrating the MSDN Wiki Community Content functionality to the main MSDN Library docs.  This means:

·         The English Community Content functionality will be available on the main Whidbey doc set on MSDN2 by the end of the calendar year.

·         The functionality will also be available on other localized versions of the Whidbey docs—languages that will be included and roll-out dates are TBD.

·         The Community Content functionality will also be available on other MSDN documentation sets—for example, the Windows SDK, the SQL Server 2005 developer documentation, and the Office 2007 developer documentation.  Which doc sets will include this functionality and when it will be added to them is TBD.

·         Community content added to the English docs on the msdnwiki.microsoft.com site will be migrated to the new home on MSDN2.  When the Community Content feature is launched on MSDN2, the English content will be removed from msdnwiki.microsoft.com.

·         After the community content is migrated to MSDN2, it will be searchable via MSDN Search, Google, and other public search engines.

Got questions?  Post them here, and I’ll try to respond.  If I don’t, you can complain to my manager, Anand, who blogs about Sandcastle, and also occasionally posts about MSDN Wiki.  :)

Cheers, MollyBos

Justin-Josef Angel has created an RSS feed that contains the complete text of MSDN Wiki community content blocks, rather than just the first 100 characters (as are available in the RSS feeds you can access from the MSDN Wiki home page).  Read about the feed in Justin's post, and then subscribe at http://www.justinangel.net/msdnwiki/MSDNWiki.aspx.

This is pretty nifty--the feed includes the full text of the MSDN content and the community content, and it can take a query string parameter that lets you filter by phrase.

-- MollyBos

We have a few extra MSDN Wiki team shirts to give away to Tech Ed attendees.  The first five people who come to the MSDN demo station in the blue TLC (or the "MSDN Wiki Lounge" [the couch by the MSDN demo station]) and have contributed five or more blocks to the MSDN Wiki will win an MSDN Wiki Hawaiian shirt!  Dan Wygant is our first winner!

-- MollyBos

Today we had another good Chalk Talk session. We're consolidating the feedback from both days and will post it soon here for you all to comment on.

In the meanwhile, two little small things:

1. Check out this video from yesterday of ~80 MSDN Wiki T-shirts being snapped up in less than 5 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl93uyHe4s
2. Check back later today for details on a special give-away for a lucky few folk at Tech*Ed.

-Paul

Today Steve presented MSDN Wiki chalk talk at the TLC area. If you are here at Tech*Ed 2006 in Bosston, please come and see us tomorrow. Molly will be presenting our next chalk talk at the TLC area:

• June 14, 2006 - Wednesday, 10:15-11:30am in Dev Theater 1 in the Blue area

You can see pictures of MSDN Wiki team at the following link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephbu/tags/msdnwiki/

We did not realize that we have a T-shirt sales person in our team!

Anand..

MSDN Wiki is at Tech*Ed in Boston. If you're here, stop by one of our chalk talks to learn more and to provide feedback on where you'd like to see us take MSDN Wiki next.

• Tuesday, 1-2:15pm in Dev Theater 1 in the Blue area
• Wednesday, 10:15-11:30am in Dev Theater 1 in the Blue area

Also, starting Tuesday, look for us handing out MSDN Wiki T-shirts around the TLC.

See you there!

-Paul Chapman

I’m super excited about the response to the MSDN Wiki launch.  Much of the response has been positive, and folks have asked some great questions.  Let me try to address a few of the common questions people have about the site:

Will this be added to the entire MSDN Library or other doc sets? 

Most likely; MSDN is already investigating this.  The current project is a joint development effort between MSDN and the Developer Division, and our focus for v1 is on adding wiki-like features to the Whidbey docs.

Why are you adding yet another website that contains the same set of documentation??

One of the comments to Soma’s post about MSDN Wiki provides a comprehensive lists of all the places you can find developer content on Microsoft.com – msdn, msdn2, windowssdk.msdn….  Yes, there is already way too much content duplication, and search can produce incredibly confusing results since it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether content is coming from Everett docs, Whidbey docs, etc.  We’re releasing this beta on a separate site since it’s basically an experiment and we’re not quite sure how it will work out (although initial indications are positive J).  We want to keep the official docs separate for now in case we run into performance problems with the wiki software (we’re not sure what kind of write volume to expect) or we have vandalism problems and find that we need to add more moderation features.  When we officially release v1 of this functionality (ideally by the end of the calendar year) we plan to roll it back into the official Whidbey documentation (currently on MSDN2). 

When will you support FireFox?

Soon!  For this release, we got to a point where we had to choose between making our editor work in FireFox and fixing some editor bugs causing content drop-out.  Since the bugs in the latter category affected more users we decided to fix those and punt FireFox support to a future release.  It’s high on our list of issues to address in the near future.

How can I delete content?

I’ve already seen a few cases where people have created new content blocks and then found a better place for the content they added (either merging it into an existing block or placing it on a different page).  After they moved the content, they weren’t sure what to do with the block they had created.  They needed delete functionality!  Right now, only moderators can delete content.  From observing the wiki over the past couple days, we’ve realized that we need to extend this a bit so that all contributors can delete blocks they create.  

That's all for now...more coming soon.  I'm trying to read as many blog posts and comments as possible to collect feedback and questions about the site, but if you have particular questions you'd like to make sure I address, please post them here!

-- MollyBos, MSDN Wiki PM

We publicly released MSDN Wiki this morning, at http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com.  Check it out and let us know what you think.  You can post feedback here in our blog, or file bugs and suggestions in the MSDN Wiki Connect Workspace.

What is MSDN Wiki?

The MSDN Wiki site experiments with ways we can integrate community contributions into the Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 documentation.  This is phase one.  On the current site you can add content and edit other people’s contributions in a wiki-like fashion around the official Microsoft-authored docs.  In the future we want to take this further by allowing people to edit the Microsoft-authored docs directly.  Let us know what you want to see!

-- Molly Bostic, MSDN Wiki PM