TechEd Redux
What a week!
It’s always great to be able to get out and talk with you folks face-to-face to get raw, unedited input, and TechEd IT Pro was no exception. :-) I spoke with close to 40 people while I was in the booth, and a few others on the show floor, at parties and on the shuttle bus. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to talk.
Here's what you told me and what I learned:
· You equate the TechNet web site with your TechNet subscription. If you're in this group, take a look at the free, publically available TechNet web site. We have TechCenters organized by product and technology that provide a centralized location for information that you just won't see in the Library or if you're in the subscription area.
· We have a lot of web site features you don't know about. Forums. Tagging. Library annotation (wiki). Social bookmarking. Search refinements. Contributor profiles. And more. I'll blog more about these in the future so you can have a detailed look at what we have that you might not know about, but I describe them a bit below.
· We think our web sites are more important to you than you do. Our sites/centers are just one resource out of many that you use or find via search. We'll be working hard in the coming months to try and make them more useful to you by weaving in more and more of our web platform features into the TechCenters.
Our new Forums platform provides filtering by answer state and coupled with inline preview, you can quickly scope down and examine the needles in the haystacks, without having to do a page reload. I learned that most of you really liked the inline preview feature of forums.
Forums also allow you to do compound tagging and then an application of a filter, and this operates across all of the forums to expose threads you might not see in the forums that you don’t regularly monitor. An oft-overlooked feature I'd like to highlight is that you can enable an RSS feed of those settings to track products or technologies. Many people I talked to thought that this was the “killer feature” on the forums.
Dropping into a Forum thread, you can see our reputation system in action, and many of you liked this feature as it provides a quick way to see the "trust level" of a contributor. From a thread and if you're logged in, you can add it to your personal or global bookmarks. The profile page also is another way to quickly judge the contribution level of a participant. Bookmarking also supports compound tagging and RSS tracking.
Even with all these new tools, finding the stuff you want can still be a challenge sometimes and we are working to make things better on that front as well. The search box, which you'll find in the top left corner of every page, now has many more auto-complete keywords a couple orders of magnitude actually. Try typing in “windows server” and seeing what shows up in the list.
If you do a search on "windows server", you'll have about 3,260,000 results - too many to sort through. Try refining by topic to "Windows Server 2008", this will take the results set down to 89,400 – almost two full orders of magnitude, then scope by "KB and Forums". The result set will now be 3,970 – close to three orders of magnitude from where we started. Go back to auto-complete for “windows server 2008 download” and search again, and you'll have 773 results. Finally refine by "SQL Server", and you're down to the two(!) results where SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 downloads intersect in the forum/KB.
Try our search the next time you are looking for something - you may be pleasantly surprised.
Other than an unscheduled night I had to spend in Chicago on the way back to Seattle due to a weather delay, it was a great trip!
FIN
