Team Developer MSDN Forums Refactored
We've done some refactoring to our Team System MSDN web forums that should significantly help customers using our features. There are three key reasons driving this change.
Our VSTS Team Developer forums are now:
- Visual Studio Code Analysis and Code Metrics
- Visual Studio Performance Tools (Profiler)
- Visual Studio Application Verifier
Reasoning...
1. Improve Clarity
Previously we had a single "VSTS Team Developer" forum (and one for FxCop), but what the heck is that suppose to be? Many people would see that title and think "gosh, I have Team System and am doing development, I should ask my coding questions there". This just seams so systemic of Microsoft, making public the way we think of the product as opposed to how the customer may think of it. We're working on improving this, the this forum refactoring is one such improvement.
FYI, "Team Developer" is short for "Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers" (dang that's long). It is the name for both a specific SKU of Team Suite as well as the Product Unit (PU) of ~60 people that I work on. My PU owns and develops the above three main feature areas (plus the VS Debugger and some exciting new stuff).
2. Improve the Signal to Noise Ratio
Another reasons we refactored the forums was that we were getting a lot of questions that did not apply to our product that we couldn't answer and had to move to other forums. Amazingly simple, but just changing the names I hope helps with this.
3. Improve Response Times
Due to the high noise and having such broad set of questions, it was hard for customers and our own team to find questions within their domain of expertise to answer. Hence the forums' response rates were poor which would result in poor forum stats (yes, we closely track our response and satisfaction stats).
We Need Your Help!
If you use these features, please help us out by answering questions! We regularly review the top responding customers to look for Team System MVPs nominations or other key customers using our product to interact with and get feedback on our future plans.
Shouts out for making this happen go to: Joel Morel (own the MSDN Forums), David Kean (#1 MSDN Wiki contributor), and Rob Caron (VSTS community extraordinaire).
Comments
Anonymous
April 26, 2007
To help us better align our Team Developer forums with our feature and how our customers use our products,Anonymous
April 30, 2007
Brian Keller on Clear Channel's adoption of Visual Studio Team System. The MSBuild Team Blog on Caching...