See you next week at MMS in Vegas. Visit us at the booth and enter the contest:
Colleague Thomas Willingham has released a short video showing how we collected feedback from TechNet. Check it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/872bb469-4a79-4934-8287-9d16ac9ead1d
Once you start this wiki thing - “doing community” – you quickly find the need to stay on top of changes others make to topics. Perhaps you only care about the ones you started, perhaps you care about ones that others started, but that you depend on.
Either way, you need a way to stay on top of any changes. The TN Wiki has email notification:
If you use the “Compare this page with earlier revisions” link – you can see the deltas visually highlighted for you.
You can also subscribe to RSS feeds of tags, or searches, or both if you are a belt & suspenders kind of person.
Heck, you can even subscribe to a user!
Enjoy, leave feedback.
Remember to contribute boldly, edit gently.
Today is launch day for the TechNet Wiki (TNWiki). Check it out at http://technet.com/wiki.
The wiki motto is:
Join in and help start the community. Kathy shows how on YT:
Here’s Eric’s announce vid:
Leave feedback. This is wiki V1, help build the wiki you want on the forum.
One of the new enhancements to the TechNet Wiki (Beta) makes it easy for you to share wiki content with your social networks. At the bottom-right of the page is the little gizmo that allows one-click “socialization” to services like Twitter, Reddit, Digg, etc.. Check it out:
The TechNet Wiki (Beta) has some new nifty features, including:
It hasn’t happened very often during the Beta, but The TN Wiki is down right now for a few hours for upgrades. See you soon!
When you land on a TechNet Wiki article for the first time, it is not clear that you can edit the wiki pages. This is because you must first join and sign in to see the “Edit” button.
This video demo shows that this process start-to-finish takes only a few minutes.
Here’s How to Join.
To sign up
IMPORTANT: The sign-in name cannot be changed once you create it. If you make a mistake, the account must be deleted, and then you can create another one. Take care entering your sign-in name. You can change your display name whenever you wish.
Finish by accepting the services agreement:
NOTE: You will receive a notification e-mail at the e-mail address you entered in step 3, confirming your account creation.
To contribute, you must first sign in. To sign in, you must first Join. After those pre-reqs are accomplished, editing a TN Wiki article is pretty easy. This 10 minute video shows PM Eric Batallio demonstrating:
Is there stuff missing from the how to edit topic? Can you help improve it? Join the wiki today: http://technet.com/wiki
Feedback/feature requests on the TN Wiki Beta? Go to TN Wiki Forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/tnwiki/
Check them out, for example this page of PowerShell Vids called Script Center Videos for some reason not immediately obvious…
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/dd334524.aspx
TechNet Videos
Mary Jo Foley interviews Microsoft’s Betsy Aoki at
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5712&tag=col1;post-5712
Her leadership is inspirational and one of the reasons I love this company.
You wouldn’t be reading this on http://blogs.technet.com/ if it were not for Betsy.
Have you heard? TechNet has launched a wiki for IT Pros and Devs – the TechNet Wiki (Beta). Why does this matter? If you think about the content development and distribution business in terms of the software business, then you can consider every un-met customer expectation as a “bug”. As relates to content, on the product teams at Microsoft we try to anticipate customer content needs, and fill them.
Working with community on this problem is starting to show some exciting signs of success. For example, I started a page on the wiki called Hyper-V: Gotchas, to collect some common Hyper-V customer issues, along with the fixes. Technically speaking, the information in this wiki article is not “new” – much of it is available on Microsoft websites, in different places, and with titles that conform to Microsoft content business guidelines. However, looking around community, I see that a lot of IT Pros refer to these issues as “gotchas”. On the wiki I can use this title, in the TechNet library – not so much.
So I captured a common issue here for IT Pros setting up the free-as-in-beer version of Hyper-V (Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2). There is no UI, so if you are unfamiliar with working on the command line (even if you are familiar) it is easy to mistype the OCSETUP command params – they are case sensitive.
But here’s the cool part – a community member came along and added use-case information I hadn’t thought to add!
“In fact, OCSetup.exe (as well as ServerManagerCmd.exe) is considered deprecated in Windows Server 2008 R2 (and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 also). You're supposed to use new Server Manager PowerShell cmd-lets. The good thing about these cmdlets is that they are not case sensitive (as everything in PowerShell).
But there may be special considerations when Server Manager PowerShell cmdlets are not enough. Consider the following scenario. You install Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) in Virtual Machine. You need to install Hyper-V Server Role to enable Item-level recovery (ILR) from backed up virtual machines. But installation of Hyper-V role normally requires presence of Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (HAV). This feature is not available in Virtual Machines. So you need to bypass this check. In order to do it you have to use another command-line tool that is also new to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and called “Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM)”. And this tool is a case-sensitive one. So you should type the following command exactly as shown.
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Hyper-V”
This was easy to find, because the wiki mailed me the notification my article had been edited, and I clicked Compare Versions, which shows me the changes in green highlights.
It’s the wiki way.
Meanwhile, over on the PowerShell Survival Guide page, I started off on Feb 28 2010 with 228 words for around a dozen links to PS content. 27 days later, a dozen or so people have expanded this page to over 900 words of links (in two languages) that they know are useful (not some search engine guess…).
I’m cautiously optimistic this thing might work.
Ever wanted to help write a KB? Perhaps get the info a little faster? Now you can on the TechNet Wiki (Beta). Here’s an interesting ground-breaking example:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/biztalk-server-backup-job-does-not-delete-backup-files.aspx
The new TechNet Wiki (Beta) is (wide) open and folks are contributing some valuable content, and trying new things. As the content set grows, it becomes more and more challenging to find stuff. Inthe Beta, most folks are missing that the search bar at the top of the TN Wiki page is for searching the wiki. (noted for Vnext in the TNWIKI Forum).
You can also subscribe to lots of stuff using RSS, pipe that into Outlook, and then run rules on the folders to bring things to your attention.
While Outlook is running, it will periodically check the feeds to which you have subscribed and download any new content. Outlook shows an unread count for each feed next to the folder, so you can quickly see if there are new items you haven’t read yet. Because Outlook downloads the RSS feed data from onto your computer, you can access that data even while offline.
You can delete posts as you read them or keep posts of interest long after they have been removed from the feed. You can also categorize posts, move them to a separate folder, or flag them for follow up as you please.
On the wiki you can also subscribe to an article. When you click Post an article and create your content, by default the Email me updates to this page option is checked.
When you click Save, an email "subscription" is created and you will receive e-mail notifications to the address associated with your user name whenever the page is changed. This notice look like this.
To turn off these notifications, in the Options menu, click Unsubscribe to Article (Email),
Click the RSS button on your browser to copy the RSS feed for the content page you are on. For example, in IE8, it looks like this:
I use the RSS feed for a search:
If you use Add as Friend on another user, you will see the content they work on displayed on the Activity page of the Wiki homepage and <where else?>
To add a user as a friend, click on their username. Click Add as Friend.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed for a tag. Whenever you update your feed reader, you will get notification of new content with that tag.
A few years ago a Microsoft colleague names Jon Pincus talked about “Changing Grumbling Into Energy”. One of the most interesting things about the TechNet Wiki (Beta) is how liberating and energizing it is. See a problem with the documentation? Frustrated by how long it takes/how difficult it is to get it changed? Just change it your self on the wiki. Better yet, someone else might fix it first…
Can't find it? Write it! is on every wiki page, including the search, and is going on a t-shirt soon…
The TechNet Wiki (Beta) opened for early adopters 3 days ago. At the end of the first week there has been some great feedback and even greater content.On this page you can see the little widget that keeps track of the contributions.
Some interesting stories are developing. For example, I created a stub topic called “Windows PowerShell Survival Guide” on 2/28 (part of a SG series). This topic was intended to be a place to gather resources similar to the hard-copy Survival Guides we hand out at TechEd. Then I waited and watched to see what happened. The screenie below shows the 5 day results (all in green has been added by others):
400% increase in quality links, including TN Library links, links to video, Facebook, newsgroups, and local user group meetings.
Some important new Hyper-V content had published in the TechNet library:
Check it out.
Interesting developments on the TechNet Wiki (follow the wiki on Twitter): localized content.
What do you think? Leave comments.
Check it out, a wiki for IT Pros and Devs. Leave feedback.
There are some Hyper-V articles there already (some more complete than others – that’s the wiki way).
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=Hyper-V
Keith Combs has broken the news on his blog that TechNet Wiki is coming:
http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2010/02/23/technet-2-0-episode-6-wiki.aspx
Co-created content – Microsoft and IT Pro/Dev customers together in community. What do you think?
Leave comments.
I love XKCD…
may all my colleagues in IT Pro and Dev content read this to REALLY understand the customer…
and tremble…
SuperFlows are new content types for Microsoft, here’s a new one for troubleshooting TMG installs. In a SuperfFlow, we can filter information to that is it more relevant. For example, in a branching tree, we can show you just the procedures that apply to your resultant set of choices.
Check it out and leave feedback on SuperFlows. What other SuperFlows would you like to see?
Hyper-V Senior Developer Keith Mange has released his NVSPBIND tool for free-as-in-beer. Watch the 10 minute video demo at: http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/d815cd2b-3c03-4c41-bdc8-c2794850b4ed or click the image.
NVSPBIND is a tool for modifying network bindings from the command line. It is especially useful in Server Core environments with the Hyper-V role enabled. Keith also published nvspcrub.js, a tool for removing Hyper-V Virtual Networking Configuration from the parent partition. It is especially useful in Server Core environments when the Hyper-V UI may not be available. Available at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspscrub
A new type of content has arrived – the SuperFlow. See an example in the SCCM Software Update Deployment SuperFlow.
Among the innovations, flowcharts that are interactive, like this:
When you click on the Process to Create an Update List, it expands so you can see detailed info, like this:
Nifty. Check out all the new SuperFlows in the Download Center.
The first Security Bulletin for Hyper-V is out at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-010.mspx.