Your Configuration Manager Writing Team - also known as the User Assistance (UA) 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 Steve Kaczmarek (Content Publishing Manager); Carol Bailey, Doug Eby, and Jeff Gilbert (all senior technical writers); and Rob Stack and Nathan Barnett (technical writers). Our backgrounds include field experience as consultants, administrators, trainers, and support engineers using 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.

Our 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. Yes, we file bugs against the product and against our content, too! As a result, we have a close working relationship and engagement with the Configuration Manager product group and related partner teams.

But as many of you know, we are involved in more than just "writing documentation." For example, you might have seen the latest version of the Configuration Manager Feature Quizzes, a SilverLight-based tool, 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 an Excellence 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 recently retired it so that we could join forces with the Configuration Manager Product Team. We're now frequent contributors to this blog, although we currently post round-up information to the writer's blog for existing subscribers.

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 last year, Steve published the Microsoft Press book, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Administrator's Companion - with the co-authoring help of several team members (Carol, Rob, Doug, Jeff, and Cathy Moya ,who has now joined the Microsoft Hardware division). This book won a Merit Award from STC - Puget Sound.

In the future, you can expect to see more information from us delivered in alternative formats, including video, scenario-based content, workflows and process flowcharts, and, of course, our newest content model - 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 an Excellence Award from STC - Puget Sound.

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