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Give feedback on "Orcas" feature specifications

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In the last few years, blogs have been largely instrumental in increasing transparency into Microsoft. From celebrity ex-Microsoft blogger, Scoble to the over 3000 bloggers now on MSDN blogs, we have been sharing more and more details of our development processes and technology bits through our blogs.

Why is this important? Generally, at Microsoft, development cycles are over 2 years long, and in some cases, even much longer. With increased transparency we can disclose a lot of our product features even before it is released. This provides us the essential customer connection and opens the feedback channel. Moreover, many times I have read a program manager's blog explaining the internal details of our product so that customers can troubleshoot and have a better understanding of the product.

Recently, we started a great initiative to share the product feature specifications of "Orcas" here: https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948851.aspx. During the development cycle, we make some assumptions of how the customer will use the product and prioritize the most important use cases. We are (hopefully) mostly close to correct, but sometimes we might have missed the mark and we want you to tell us. I feel this is a great leap forward in increasing transparency and involving the community in the development process. Give us your feedback today. 

I worked on the Office Workflow Tools feature and would welcome any feedback you have on it. We will surely take it into consideration in planning for future releases.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2007
    It is off-topic but my recommendation is to create an Express VSTo version for Office development, for writing simple Office add-ins. Firefox is popular especially amongst the technical world more and more because of the numerous extentions and the community of extention developers that has been built around it. Please create such a community around Office as well. Imagine the increased value of Office once a community site containing community-contributed and useful free Office add-ins has been created. To do this and since still currently writing Office add-ins, contrary to Firefox ones, is too hard, consider creating a free Express of VSTO version for office development.