As part of my efforts for the next Fiscal Year and as a direct result of the SBS Community Survey, I have made a commitment around reorganizing and restructuring the SBS Community Page on MS.com.

When you look at the results from the SBS Community Survey, a resounding observation was that information on SBS was very difficult to find and that there is a HUGE amount of technical resources available on SBS on the internet, the challenge is sorting through all of it and finding the resource you need. The majority of respondents overwhelming stated with a ratio of 3:1 that third party web sites and blogs were the number one community resource on SBS that they use. The second most popular community resource was a tie, the SBS Newsgroups and SBS User Groups. When you drill into the respondents that stated that third party websites and blogs are where they went, a large number stated that that they use Google as their number one community resource for SBS along with some of the most popular third party SBS sites,  http://www.smallbizserver.net, E-Bitz - SBS MVP the Official Blog of the SBS "Diva" and Support and Discussion Group for Small Business Server all Versions (4.0, 4.5, 2000 and 2003). Only a handful of the respondents stated that the MS owned resources like TechNet and the MS.com pages on SBS were being used as a primary community resource on SBS.  When you then look at how MS owned resources like TechNet and the MS.com pages on SBS were rated as compared to third party web sites and blogs, User Groups and the SBS Newsgroups, the aforementioned community resources were ranked around 40%% valuable or extremely valuable with about 10% saying N/A as compared to around 73% valuable or extremely valuable for the later.  That is an overwhelming vote to me that these pages are in dire need of some help.

If you look at the way the SBS Community Page on MS.com is currently organized there are a couple of dead links or irrelevant links to Blogs from MS employees on SBS.  The way that the web parts are designed they are supposed to dynamically link all MS employees blogs that were registered as covering SBS. In a large number of cases, these employees have never blogged about SBS or it has been a long time since they have. The resources on the Community page are categorized in buckets; Participate in a Newsgroup,  View a webcast, locate an event, or join a chat, Find a User Group; Windows SBS Blogs by MS employees, recent Windows SBS Blog posts, Meet the SBS MVPs, Windows Small Business Server Solutions by MVPs, Related Communities (Find how-to articles, discussion groups, hot topics, and more on these non-Microsoft sites.), Other Microsoft Communities, and the then a whole other section called More Resources with the following links; Highlights, Windows Small Business Server Knowledge Base Articles, and Top Windows Small Business Server Downloads. Let’s face it the page has a huge amount of content and depending on who you ask, some of the links would be vastly more important than other links.  I am not really sure if people find this page very useful or if people actually know all of the links that are on this page because it is so big. The How would you rate the usefulness of this content app is at the very bottom of this page. Again, not sure how discoverable this is.

So, where do I start?

My plan is to break this up into small and achievable chunks.

Blog Section on the SBS Community Page

 I am first starting with running some maintenance on the Windows SBS Blogs by Microsoft Employees Web Part.  The plan is to remove all irrelevant links to MS bloggers who do not blog about SBS and then prioritize the list of blogs by relative importance. I will probably statically list at least 5 blogs that I think are really important to list and then the rest will be accessible by clicking on the More Windows SBS Blogs link.

Second, I need to figure out how to give the most popular third party web sites and blogs some air time and then provide a link to all the rest of the blogs that were identified from the survey.

Third, I need to discover a new way to organize the blogs or at least categorize them so that members of the community can get some assistance in figuring out which blog they should go read.  I would love it if people could comment on my blog and give me suggestions on how they would like to see the blog section of the page organized. Maybe if each blogger let us know what they typically blog about regarding SBS, that would help. For example, some people blog more about prescriptive guidance as it regards to implementing SBS. Some, go to great lengths to talk about their experience with SBS and the things that they have learned.  Categories I have thought of would be, Prescriptive Guidance/Best Practices, Lessons Learned / a Day in the life of an SBS Admin, Setup and Deployment, Known Issues.

Find a User Group

I think the next easy fix is to tackle the Find a user group link at the top of the page. This is not really what it should say or where it should take you. It should say, Find an SBS User Group and maybe have an additional link to find a generic User Group on the following page. The user is on an SBS Community page, we should send them to a list of SBS User Groups, not some generic User Group page that contains a lot of text and a lot of confusion on what they should click on next. If you want to confuse them, do it somewhere else or with a different link. Does this make sense?  Why shouldn’t the link just take you here?

The next step would be to work with everyone to make sure the list is up to date and includes not only the US, Israel, Canada, and Australia. My understanding is that there are over 20 user groups in Canada. So, this list is probably out of date.

Well, I know this was a lot, but when you are gone for 6 weeks, you tend to have a lot to think about. I would sincerely appreciate your advice on this. I know I will be resourcing a lot of internal MS folks for thier assistance as well on this. Of course, this is not all that needs to be done to this page, but this is part of the plan. I plan on describing at length more of the things I plan to tackle around this site over the next couple of months as well as sharing more insights from the SBS Community Survey.

Thanks again,

Kevin