AprilR
I am excited to be working on the new Developer Help Experience Team!
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April Reagan: The Future of MSDN Help
Feb 06, 2008 at 12:15 AMAll:
Yes - love all the comments about making Intellisense tooltips 'smarter'..we've got thoughts along those lines as well
Agree that the content itself has room for improvement - I'm talking with the right folks about these issues
Some specific responses:
JChung2006 - I will look for and find a pointer to the Sidebar gadget that is running around out there to search MSDN - I'll post it to my blog when I find it; there had also been some internal efforts to get command line access to the library - I'll have to track that down and see where it landed. Again, watch my blog for more details.
nektar - good question about Windows help, etc...currently help is a bit of a patchwork approach in even our biggest products. We will be talking to the windows client folks, and other product teams as we gain some traction. Our initial focus is on developers, and ITPro, which have some scenarios which aren't typical in a consumer environment. Certainly if we design with simplicity and flexibility, we will be able to serve the needs across the spectrum - the small and tidy 100 topic package up through the millions-of-topic-not-so-tidy assistance needs of, say, the MSDN library. Just not everyone all in one release
BSalita - I think your crystal ball is probably right, but we must start out on a small focused goal and build on that...it would be great if we can end up serving the far broader need that you point out
John E. Boy - have you got opposable thumbs for sale, then? My dog would love to purchase two but he can't work the mouse....besides that, great points
Typesafe - thanks for the reference! These types of detailed customer verbatims do help to make a difference
jlb0001 - cool ideas! we do have the community comments feature, but proportionately, we need much more involvement there!
invenetix - You might look at the learning resources here: http://www.microsoft.com/express/ - not to say that we shouldn't also be doing a better job in helping people learn to use the product from the start, we should, but in the meantime perhaps these resources will help you out.
AGAIN - thank you ALL for your comments - keep them coming and stay tuned to http://blogs.msdn.com/aprilr
- AprilR