One of the projects I'm working on now is the family of systems that will become the new publishing & rendering system for at least the Microsoft.com Home Page. It's a really cool project that's pulled together a lot of the best people at Microsoft.com and has the potential to really improve a lot of things by really streamlining the content production process, while also introducing some really cool new look & feel elements.
Last week, we released a visual design preview of what the new home page might look like to the MSCOM Preview Site and started soliciting feedback from customers who are randomly chosen through a similar mechanism as the one used for our customer satisfaction surveys. Those who are chosen receive the link to the site, along with an opportunity to provide feedback on the look & feel and overall usability of the new design. The preview site was designed to work only with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, so if you're using a different browser, the preview site won't work for you - you'll be redirected to the regular www.microsoft.com Home Page.
It's important to note that the visual design preview site is just that -- a preview of the look & feel of what the Microsoft.com site could look & feel like at some point in the future. It's just a mock-up -- it's not running on the systems & software that will actually be used if and when this new design goes into production. They're not even built yet - in fact, some parts of it are still in the Design phase, with specs being written & reviewed.
As the Release Manager for the Microsoft.com Home Page, and the new publishing & rendering systems projects, I am responsible for ensuring that all of our internal release criteria are met whenever we release projects into production. When the new systems are released into production, the new Home Page will meet the same criteria that the Microsoft.com Home Page currently does -- including the same matrix of supported browsers. After all, it's the Microsoft.com team's job to make sure that customers -- no matter what browser they choose to use -- can get to the content on Microsoft.com in order to find out about our products.
