Chandana Hathi (MSFT) WebLog

I am still hoping for a much larger response rate considering that there are a great number of you who are actively participating in User Groups. Please feel free to get the word out. Here are some initial numbers:

1. On where the responses are coming from: Majority of the responses are from the US and Canada regions. It would be great to see more responses from other regions.

 2. On satisfaction with local Microsoft office: Interestingly enough a large number of responses show a positive experience with regards to local office interaction. Of those who have expressed their dissatisfaction, I have reviewed your verbatims and will follow-up.

3. On Culminis or INETA as a resource:

Thank for you all your responses. The survey is open till the end of this month, so please keep 'em coming.

Chandana

Here's wishing all of you a Healthy, Happy and Peaceful 2007.

As promised here's an update on the survey:

As of 1:20PM today we had 213 responses! Thank you very much. Here's a breakdown by region:

Some of you have contacted me to ask me if you can spread the word on to user groups that I may have not covered. Absolutely, please feel free to do so.

I will have some more insight into the responses seen so far later on this week.

Chandana

The Windows Server Product Team would like to hear from the User Group Community. This is a direct anonymous survey, with the goal to improve services targeted towards User Groups. We want to know what your experience is with the community resources and information that is available to you today as a member of the User Group Community. We also want to know what you think could be done to improve your Community Experience. Please take a couple of minutes to provide us your candid feedback via this survey so we can provide the most effective experience possible.

Here is the link to the survey: User Group Community Survey.

Thanking you in advance,

The Windows Server Community Team

I am happy to announce the launch of TechNet Forums and specifically the Windows Server forums. They can be found at http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/default.aspx?siteid=17.

The Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) forums went live on the 17th and the Windows Server codename "Longhorn" went live today. Over the course of next few weeks we will slowly roll out forums for the other workloads within Windows Server.

With all the buzz around 64bit versions it is timely that we are having the two chats focused around 64 bit offerings. We had the first of the two wherein, Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Windows Server Division and Abhi Talwalkar, Vice President & General Manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group discussed Microsoft and Intel’s industry standard platforms for 64-bit enterprise computing. We had 79 unique attendees and 49 question answered. While the number of attendees was lower than I had expected the questions coming in were really good. I will have the link to the transcript next week.

Coming up next is the chat with the AMD team. Please join Bob Muglia and Fred Weber, Chief Technical Officer of AMD, to discuss the development and plans for enterprise-ready, high-availability systems for which the AMD Opteron processor based on AMD64 technology is optimized. This chat is sceduled to take place on May 5th at 10.00AM (PST).

Well we did have the Longhorn Networking Revealed chat and what amazing interest was shown! We could not get started fast enough and then as the hour was ending we still kept getting questions. Of the 422 questions asked we could answer about 110 or so, but as promised, below are links to all the transcripts. This Executive chat series has been a very enjoyable and educating experience for me. It is very rewarding to see the Executive take the time and really have a good time doing these.

As I was mentioning to our SMS Community Lead, Wally Mead today, that I am finally seeing folks "Get Community". We have a little ways to go but I am seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. We are working hard in our team to provide the infrastruture needed for folks so that they can easily incorporate community in their daily work, so that should really help. I need to have a little more patience!

Links to the transcripts:

SBS :139 unique participants, 94 questions answered

R2 : 62 unique participants, 109 questions answered

Medium Business IT Generalist : Low attendance

MOM : 152 unique participants, 110 questions answered

Networking : 422 unique participants and 307 questions

Chandana

Tomorrow will be the 5th of our on-going series of Executive chats. Here are the details:

I will be providing the links to the transcripts of these chats shortly. If you have had an opportunity to attend these please let me know what you think about them.

Thanks,

Chandana

In the Windows Server Org we have 268 MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals). This number was not as big couple of years ago and it grew dramatically then. While we were really happy to have them we were not ready for them. When I say "not ready for them" I mean we had no plans in place around what or how we would effectively interact with them. Unfortunately therefore, for a long time there was almost no interaction between the MVPs and the Product team. Over the last two years we have focused on changing that. We still have a ways to go, we have evolved from not having any consistent ongoing interaction to (in most cases) ongoing monthly conversations between the two parties. These conversations will surely lead to better engagement ideas and opportunities!

Hi this is Chandana Hathi a member of the Windows Server Community team.

The charter of our team is to increase IT Pro satisfaction with Microsoft. Basically this means changing the culture of a company to be more in-tune with the customers. 

Parts of the company, such as the developer divisions, have been more effective at it and have been working for a longer time at establishing an online community. As a result we have a lot of engaged developers in the community.

However for the other parts of the company involving customers at every stage of the product life cycle has not very easy to do. This, in my opinion, is due to the lack of infrastructure that is needed as well as (and more importantly) the need to make community interactions an integral part of the daily job and getting recognized and rewarded for it.

This will change in the upcoming months.

In my blog I will try to outline how this change is progressing.