The wiki was just beginning when I joined Microsoft back in December of 2009. When I first heard about the wiki, when of my first thoughts was “in all the years that I ran www.isaserver.org no one ever mentioned that we should have a wiki. Indeed, I never thought about a wiki for site – and the site was very successful. So, when I was confronted with the idea of a wiki on the Microsoft TechNet site, I was a big naysayer and came up with a number of arguments for why the TechNet wiki would not be a success.

Well, I am here to say that most of the arguments and positions I took at the time are wrong – or at least not as right as I thought they were. Some of my concerns at the time included:

• Quality writers won’t contribute to the wiki because they cannot lock the content. Boy, was I wrong about that! My idea at the time was that only professional writers could provide high quality, useful content on the wiki. I’ve learned since then that you don’t need to be a professional writer to contribute useful content on the wiki, and that by not locking content, the wiki articles are getting better and better because readers can then edit the articles to increase the quality.
• Writers won’t contribute to the wiki because they will lose their brand equity. My concern here was that people would prefer to write on their own blogs so that their names would be well-known and they could build their brand as experts in a particular product or technology through their unique blogs or web sites. That turned out to not be a problem! For example, my reputation had been associated with ISA Server, Threat Management Gateway (TMG), Unified Access Gateway (UAG) and DirectAccess. I was then moved to a new team and my new focus was private cloud and private cloud architecture. Huh? What’s up with that? Then I learned about private cloud and architecture and together with other members of my team, started publishing articles on private cloud architecture in the TechNet wiki. The result? I’ve been invited to speak all over the would about private cloud and private cloud architecture! How’s that for the power of the wiki?
• Malicious writers will update the material and ruin the value of the content. Suppose you wrote a great article, spent hours and days working on it and making it perfect. Then somebody comes around and breaks it! Fills it up with the wrong information and ends up turning it into something you’d be embarrassed of. Can that happen? Sure. Does it happen? We haven’t seen much in terms of malicious edits. But suppose that did happen – all you need to do is revert to your “golden image” of the article using three clicks. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

So what are some examples of the high quality content you can find on the wiki and no where else?

Reference Architecture for Private Cloud

Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Troubleshooting Survival Guide

Recommendations for Installing, Sizing, Deploying, and Maintaining a BizTalk Server Solution

and many more!

If I read the tea leaves correctly and stare at the crystal ball long enough – I begin to see visions of the future in the TechNet wiki. Instead of the walled-off approach we take here at Microsoft to creating content and placing it into the TechNet Library, in the future we will begin creating our content on the TechNet wiki in partnership with the Microsoft writers, with the Product Groups and with the Microsoft customer community as a whole. From the very beginning, Microsoft’s customers and partners will be able to evaluate the information we plan to roll out and help us decide if its what they need. This will enable Microsoft to give you what you need from the very start – and not waste cycles on creating content that doesn’t help you meet your personal, professional and business objectives.

I also see a future where the community will work together with Microsoft to maintain and update the content. There are plenty of you who are very passionate about one or more Microsoft products and technologies. Wouldn’t be great if you and fellow devotees of that product or technology cloud work together to update the content as more information comes in? The community as a whole benefits from your on-the-job insights and free up time for Microsoft writers to work with the product groups to get even more information out there for you – information that Microsoft might not have been able to share with you in the past because there just wasn’t enough time.

Bottom line: I was wrong about the wiki and the fact is that the TechNet wiki is a BIG community win! I’m looking forward to working with many of you in the future and I know that many of my colleagues feel the same way. It’s a new world of openness and collaboration over here at Microsoft and the wiki is just one of the many initiatives where that openness shines though.

Thanks!

Tom

Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Principal Knowledge Engineer, SCD iX Solutions Group
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tshinder
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tshinder

Oh! And if you’re interested in Private Cloud and Private Cloud Architecture, check out one of more of our social sites.

A few people have asked me why our team uses the TechNet wiki to publish our content. I tell them that the number one reason why we use the wiki is that it saves us time and enables us to get our content out to the community faster than our traditional processes. That sounds good on paper, but what is it specifically about the TechNet wiki that saves us time?

It’s a good question and its worth answering, because if it saves me and the rest of my team time to use the TechNet wiki, it could save you time too!

Here are a few reasons why I think the TechNet wiki saves us time:

• Because the wiki is a open platform, we don’t have to worry about onboarding people into some closed platform to allow for collaboration. In some cases, it’s not even possible to onboard people into the closed platform, which means that you need to shuttle documents as email attachments back and forth – which makes change management difficult to do.
• We are writers, not editors. While I think we do a reasonable job at editing our own content, line editing, copy editing, developmental editing, and other types of editing do not play to our strengths. The great thing about the wiki is that there are a lot of people in the community who do enjoy these kind of editing tasks, and have been doing these tasks for us. This allows people to participate in a way to targets their core competencies.
• The TechNet wiki is a very easy to use writing environment. You can use the wiki editor, which is pretty simple and efficient, or you can use a tool like Live Writer, which allows you to copy/paste content from Live Writer to the wiki editor with a high degree of fidelity.
• Fixing mistakes in the wiki is easy! If you write something (or if a collaborator writes something) that isn’t quite the way you like, it’s a simple process to revert to a previous edit.
• The wiki platform is a no-brainer to work with. If we want to find our documents, we just search for our tags. If we want to edit the documents, we just fire up the wiki editor. There is no context switching, no separate tools for content management and editing. no onerous learning curve, no arcane series of steps to do simple things – it’s all right there in the browser. Very 21st century!

Those are just a few of the things the TechNet wiki provides that help you save time when creating technical content.

If you have some more ideas on how the TechNet wiki helps save you time, then please include them in the comments section. The best suggestion received before June 9 2012 will win a copy of my latest three books! However, you must receive your prize at TechEd North America in Orlando Florida

HTH,

Tom
Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Principal Knowledge Engineer, Private Cloud Security
SCD iX Solutions Group
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tshinder
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tshinder

Hello community, Yuri Diogenes here and on this International Update I would like to talk about the work that the Brazilian Community is doing to advertise their TechNet Wiki Content. Not only that, but get your feedback about how your community perceives the use of different Social Networks to obtain feedback from readers.

In March 2011 when the TechNet Wiki PT-BR started to take over we created a Twitter account for the Wiki Ninjas Brazil (inspired by the original US Wiki Ninjas). The goal was to advertise new content and bring awareness about what was going on in the TechNet Wiki PT-BR space.

The IT PRO (and Dev) Community in Brazil are very addicted to Social Network to proliferate content, not only the ones they create, but also from others. The use of the hashtag #TNWIKI became the default way to advertise their content via Twitter and believe, they use Twitter a lot (why is Twitter so popular in Brazil? – read this article from Time to know more). But not only Twitter is used by them in order to advertise their content and also connect to others, Facebook and LinkedIn are also used.

Is all about socialize their content and get direct feedbacks from readers in different venues. The community is doing an amazing job to rapidly adjust their content based on the user’s feedback. Recently they also started their own TechNet Wiki Forum (assisted by MS Brazil, that created the Forum under TechNet) where users can send suggestions to the platform.

Having said that, I would like to ask you (International Community) a couple of questions:

• How your regional IT PRO/Dev Community perceives the use of Social Network to advertise content?
• Do you use any of those social networks to advertise your content?

That’s all for today, let’s pump up TNWIKI by getting more social.

Have a great Friday!

	So how can you use TNWiki to challenge our language barriers? By taking these three EASY steps!
	1. It all starts with English articles. (Because it has to start somewhere!) Do you have a great article idea to write (or you already wrote)? Then don’t hesitate to post it! And if someone who speaks another language likes it, it may get translated into a second language. I illustrate that in the drawing by the tree’s larger leaf at the top. 2. Second step! What if English is not your main language? Don’t be afraid to write an article in English. “Typos” are always welcome; don’t fear them! If you make a typo in a new article, then someone will likely fix it for you (to get an edit pass on your article, you can just leave a comment here with a link to your article; someone will help you out). The result of getting the article out there is the most important thing. A great article even with some typos is better than no article at all! I illustrate that in the drawing by the tree’s smaller leaf at the top. 3. Last step. If you find a great article that you like, why not translate it? (And translate your own English articles.) That will help anyone who does not read English to stay up to date and informed. All that work will make a stronger community base for TNWiki. I illustrate that in the drawing by the tree’s root. That makes the Wiki’s foundation stronger.

In conclusion; I am really not the best in creating graphic art, but I like to think that all the international community’s work just makes a stronger structure for TNWiki’s base. More and more articles translated results in more international people visiting TechNet Wiki, and more English articles will also build a stronger attraction to the Wiki. It's a big wheel.

- French Ninja Phil (Wiki, Profile)

(P.S. A big thanks to Ed for correcting my spelling errors!)

Hello and welcome to the Thursday - Community Win.

Because this is my first post on the WikiNinjas blog let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Jan and I'm a Microsoft Student Partner from Germany.

Question: What has 7 helpful votes, 32 replies, and 4585 views?
Mh, wait! Are you really talking about a wiki article? This seems more to be something like a forum post.
Yes and no!
Ok, now I'm a little bit confused. Can you explain it?
Of course! How do you define community? Is it a collection of resouces and their members which are independent from each other? Or is community a collection of resources where people are working together across borders?
Mh, I would go with the second point.
Now you got it!

The following Community Win originally started on April 30, 2009 with a question from ncth on the SharePoint - Workflow (pre-SharePoint 2010) forum.

Ok, but what has this forum post to do with the TNWiki? Coming back to my point above, a community is not just a wiki or a forum which are independent from each other. It is more!

So, let me give a drum roll. Todays Community Win goes to ... all people who are contributing their knowledge in different ways and who cross the border between the TNForum and the TNWiki and, in todays special case, to Margriet Bruggeman!

Inspired by the contribution of several people in the SharePoint forums Margriet started a series of articles about SharePoint 2010 best practices:

• SPS 2010 Best Practices: Retrieving the Current User in a Workflow
• SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Asset vs Picture library
• SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Copying permissions between site collections
• SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: where to publish a WCF service?
• SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: Folder not necessarily considered evil
• SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: List throttling

For me that's a perfect example how a community should work (and win) together. Someone is asking a question in a forum, a lot of people are answering it, and someday someone is picking up this question, collects valuable content from this forum thread, and makes a great wiki article from it.

So, a big thanks to Margriet! Keep going!

And to all unnamed Community Ninjas who are doing the same as Margriet: THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

- German Ninja Jan (Twitter, Profile)