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!

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)

	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!)

So as my first blog posts I would love to choose a Wiki Article with a topic that I find exciting, incredible and with a feeling of "cant wait to get a hold of it". In other words, the featured article this week is Micorsoft Surface. Not only is the product appealing to me, this is one of the articles with a great layout and a lot of information. It includes pictures, videos and a lot of good references to other articles that continues to describe Microsoft Surface. The Article is written by our well known Ed Price.

But either way a featured article needs to consist of something more then just a good layout, the content is the important thing. The main article is referring to all the general information regarding Surface 2.0 with a cool video and pictures with explanation. However there are a lot more article you can follow to get a good understanding of what Surface really is, references on how to use it, guidelines and administration overview which in the end gives you the fast in-depth knowledge you would need to know in order to interact with your new multiple touch television or coffee table operated by Surface!

Microsoft Surface was first announced a couple years ago, and I remember one of the first promoting videos I saw of it where they sat a glass of wine on the "dining table" and information about the wine popped up around the glass, containg location, taste, flavors and information about the country (video can be seen here), all neat with a beautiful GUI.

So it keeps evolving and we are up to Surface version 2.0. Take a look at the article and see where you can benefit from a product like this!

- Norwegian Ninja Tord (Blog, Twitter, Wiki, Profile)

Welcome to the Monday Interview with a Wiki Ninja! As the title directly implies, this week we're interviewing a Senior Programming Writer who has been writing very deeply on the topic of Entity Framework...

Rick Saling - MSFT

From Rick's bio: "Senior programmer writer: Entity Framework. Previously I worked on the Oslo M language, and before that on WCF. I've also written an internal documentation automation tool. Prior to becoming a Microsoft employee, I was a contractor, designing SQL Server databases, and web applications. Prior to that I did many other things for many years." 

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

I’m a senior programmer/writer in Redmond, and prior to that I was a developer for a long time. I write about SQL Azure, and Entity Framework. I also got to develop an internal automation tool, so between that and writing code samples, I’m somewhat split between the writer and developer roles.

What are your big projects right now?

I’ve been contributing to the Windows Azure Prescriptive Guidance section on MSDN (Developing SQL Azure Applications) in collaboration with folks from Microsoft’s Customer Advisory Teams. Currently I’m working on a paper about Windows Azure Performance.

Besides your work on TechNet Wiki, where do you contribute?

I have a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rickatmicrosoft, MSDN Library of course, as well as less active blogs, and Twitter.

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

I moved the Entity Framework FAQs over to the Wiki in order to make it easier for community folks to update them.

• Entity Framework FAQ
• Entity Framework FAQ: Introduction
• Conceptual Model (EDM)
• Mapping and Modeling
• Entity Classes
• Relationships
• EntityKey
• Customizing Objects
• Sprocs and Functions
• Code Generation
• Architecture and Patterns
• ObjectContext
• Connections and Transactions
• Querying
• Serialization and Web Services
• Databinding
• Unit Testing
• Concurrency
• Performance
• Data Providers
• Error Messages
• LINQ to SQL
• Miscellaneous

I experimented with translating some of the questions into Spanish, using the automated translation widget, and then finalizing it by hand.

• Entity Framework FAQ (es-ES)

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with publishing things first on the Wiki, and then later on the MSDN Library, in order to show folks an “early release” of an article and in order to collect feedback. This obviously only works on released products, and not those under NDA.

What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?

I think it’s a great experiment in getting the community involved in creating “semi-official” information about Microsoft products. We try to design products (and write documentation) based on how we think customers will use our products (and documentation). We do our best to figure that out, but the real test is what customers themselves come up with. Customers know their businesses in much more detail than we do, and the way they use our products reflects that. So we entirely expect that customers will come up with problems and answers to them that we could not have anticipated. I see the Technet wiki as a great way for the community to share these kinds of insights.

==========

Special thanks to Rick Saling for his work on TechNet Wiki, in Entity Framework, and in the Spanish community efforts on TNWiki. You can check out Rick's MSDN blog here.

If you have any questions or thoughts for Rick, leave them below!

When the going gets tough, the tough gets Wiki.

   - Ninja Ed (Blog, Twitter, Wiki, Profile)