Microsoft MED Community Program: Room For Improvement ?
You may or may not know (or have come to the realization) that I run the Developer Community Program for the Windows Mobile and Embedded Devices (MED) Division. What is the Developer Community Program, you ask? Simply put, we in MED have made a point of regularly engaging with our customers, be they professionals, academics, hobbyists or what have you, to help support them in their efforts to use MED products and technologies in building innovative new devices, blazing trails in new markets, and extending the power of Windows beyond the desktop to mobile and single-purpose devices.
How do we do this, you may ask? We have a variety of channels through which we communicate and otherwise engage with our developer customers, chief among them being online chats and Webcasts through which we answer general product support questions and deliver educational content; third-party (3P) Web sites with which we affiliate to reach audiences with specialized interests or in particular geographies and languages; newsletters such as the Windows Embedded DevWire and the Windows Mobile Developer News; blogs such as this one and others edited by my colleagues, MVPs and members of the community; user group meetings and other in-person events in which human beings depart from the virtual and come together; and, of course, the ubiquitous newsgroups via which our customers pose questions to our product groups and MVPs.
What are we trying to accomplish by having created a Developer Community Program designed to engage our customer base? Essentially, what I've envisioned is a rich and diverse community that's self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, and one that has ready access to the MED product groups in order to direct feedback and questions to those of us tasked with building the latest and greatest versions of our software -- software whose reason for being is to meet the needs of those selfsame customers we're looking to engage. If we're successful, we'll have created channels that allow us to readily hold a dialogue with our customers, let them know we've heard their voices, and tell them how we're responding to their concerns. These responses may take the form of answers to questions or tools and references that help resolve an issue, or they may tend more to the abstract as we discuss new and innovative iterations of and uses for MED technologies. And further to the point, it is my hope that members of this community will interact with one another dissociated from Microsoft and in a manner that allows for sharing of ideas, information and knowledge that further fuels the desire to make more contacts within the community, innovate and discover, and move the technology forward.
That's the idea we're attempting to make a reality.
Today, we build a windows Mobile and Embedded Developer Community through tools such as the MSDN Mobility Community and Support Center, the Embedded Developers Community resources made available on MSDN, our MVP Program, Mobile and Embedded product feedback tools, and the online and in-the-flesh forums I've described above. All this begs the question, though, of how well we're actually accomplishing what we've set out to do.
And this is where you come in: let us know what you like about our programs, but more importantly, let us know what changes would make them even better. Do this by visiting our chat, newsgroups and Embedded DevWire surveys, or by simply posting a comment to this blog. Get the dialogue going! As the saying goes, if you don't share your opinion, you're not in a position to complain :)
