Come on over to the Community Bar
29 Nov
One of the things we’ve heard loud and clear at Microsoft is that people love participating in our technical communities. It has been an amazing thing for customers and really for us as a company. People get to connect with us online, they get to know the humans behind our software and get questions answered by either by us or by their peers. I consider myself so lucky to be able to a part of this all.
With anything good idea, people want to jump on and do a lot of it. With that we’ve seen a lot of great communties created out of Microsoft. With all the popularity though there have been some challenges. Often the sites don’t use the same login or authentication mechanisms, next it is hard for you to find new sites as they are often scattered across different domains and finally we don’t do a great job of sharing content amongst the various sites.
Enter the community bar…
We’ve uploaded the community bar to Channel 10 today, we’ll add it to Channel 9 next week and soon to www.iis.net / www.asp.net. The idea is to solve some of the discoverability issues. While doing so we wanted to stay true to some principles, they are:
1. Higlight quality content amongst a variety of sites and also build awareness too. We didn’t want it to be a blatent advertisement for the sites so we’re iterating through top content feeds. We think the content is valuable to you.
2. The design needed to be simple and easy to add to the sites. We did not want to “force” navigation on the sites. (no forced home link , forums, etc.) — its all about the content baby.
3. It is essential that individual sites maintain their perspective tone and style. No one wants Channel 9 to look like www.asp.net and visa versa.
So we’re hoping that the community bar helps with these issues, while still maintaining the freedom, tone and independance needed by the sites. As we learn from this we’ll start adding more sites into the equation.
On the secondary issue of multiple logins, we’re making headway there too. The logins are now federated on www.iis.net , www.asp.net , www.netfx3.com. Soon Channel 9 and 10 will be brought into that equation too. A little bit of sanity brought to you by the Evangelism Network team at Microsoft. 
Duncan a great Developer on my team has more details on his blog.
technorati tags: channel+9, 10, evangelism+network
