Configuration Manager Writing Team

Your Configuration Manager Writing Team - also known as the Information eXperience (iX) team - is dedicated to providing you, our customers, with the information you need to be successful with Configuration Manager. In fact, our vision statement is: Partnering with the right people to provide the right information at the right time.

The team members include Jason Whitmarsh (Senior Content Publishing Manager), Carol Bailey, Doug Eby, Rob Stack, Brent Dunsire, and Dionysia Sofos. Our backgrounds include field experience as consultants, administrators, trainers, and support engineers for Microsoft Windows products, and either Systems Management Server or Configuration Manager. As a result, we are very passionate about advocating for you, our fellow admins.

This writing team gets involved early in the development process for Configuration Manager releases by providing input on terminology, user interface and usability, product functionality, and identifying what content and information we need to gather and provide to support each feature and end-to-end solutions. We continue to support the product after release, and partner closely with Customer Support Services (CSS) and the sustained engineering (SE) team. This means we have a close working relationship and engagement with the Configuration Manager product group and related partner teams. As a result of this partnership and based on feedback we receive from our customers, we publish updates to our online content, and announce it on this blog.

But as many of you know, we are involved in more than just "writing documentation." For example, you might have seen the Configuration Manager Feature Quizzes, developed by Rob Stack. The quizzes help you understand the prerequisites and requirements around key features of Configuration Manager and provides links to the relevant content in our TechNet Documentation Library. This tool won a Merit Award from the Puget Sound Chapter of the Society of Technical Communication (STC).

We also started our own team writer's blog in May 2006. This proved very popular with customers, but we retired it so that we could join forces with the Configuration Manager Product Team.

Several writers also contribute to other community sites and present sessions or labs at industry conferences - such as the annual Microsoft Management Summit. You might also know that in 2008, Steve Kaczmarek (former Content Publishing Manager for this team) published the Microsoft Press book, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Administrator's Companion - with the co-authoring help of several team members who included Carol, Rob, Doug, Jeff Gilbert (now the Content Publishing Manager for Application Virtualization and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization - MED-V), and Cathy Moya (who left the team to join the Microsoft Hardware division but is now back with Configuration Manager as a PM). This book won a Merit Award from STC - Puget Sound.

We also produce information in alternative formats, including video, scenario-based content, workflows and process flowcharts, and, of course, the SuperFlow. The SuperFlow is developed by Doug Eby and one of our programmer writers Andy de George, and it provides an interactive approach to understanding a work or process flow. This model won a Distinguished Award from STC - Puget Sound.  You can find the latest released SuperFlows for Configuration Manager here.

As always, we welcome feedback from our customers and partners, so feel free to contact us by using our team alias: smsdocs@microsoft.com!