Improving our communication with the community

Brian Harry

I got some feedback on a recent post about how annoying it can be to track down information about VSTS.  The post complained about lack of “official” content and blog posts that chain to other blog posts etc. Well a few of us got together recently to talk about the problem.  It’s been a long standing one.  Publishing “official” content through official channels is complicated and time consuming.  On the other hand, publishing blog posts is easy :).  The downside of blog posts is the information is distributed, sometimes of dubious quality and frequently intermixed with random stuff. With this background, we talked about how to get the best of both worlds.  What we decided to try is to identify a handfull of bloggers at Microsoft and judiciously use a new set of blog tags on their blogs to identify content that “makes the grade” for official Microsoft content.  We’ll put an aggregator on each of the VSTS MSDN development centers where the appropriate tags are aggregated for a stream of “official” content.  We’ll keep this content for an extended period of time so that it is searchable, etc. Over the next few months, I expect we’ll be refining this process to adapt it to fill the need that is otherwise unaddressed.  As always I’ll be very interested to hear your feedback and will make adjusments as needed.  Hopefully you will find it useful.  Watch our developer centers over the next week or so for it to become active.  If you see a Microsoft blogger producing lots of content you think would fit the bill, let me know and we’ll look into adding their stuff. Thanks,

Brian

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