August 2004 - Posts
MVP Sites
Live Webcast
- MVP Charlie Russel, a columnist for the Windows XP Expert Zone site since the launch of Windows XP, will deliver a live webcast presentation on How to get and install Service Pack 2. Wednesday, September 1, 2004: 10:00 AM Pacific time (Greenwich mean time - 7 hours) The webcast will also be available for viewing on demand if you cannot make the live session. This webcast is for home users and those who help home users in the online community.
Chats and Newsgroups
- There's an ambitious schedule of live chats coming up where you can get quick answers to your questions. The attendance for these chats has been increasingly lively. Jana Carter, the chat manager for the Microsoft Communities team, deserves credit for scheduling and promoting these. Here is the chat schedule.
- Windows XP Service Pack 2 is the dominant topic of discussion in the Windows XP Newsgroups. The MVPs, Microsoft support pros, and other experts are providing a lot of helpful and specific advice. If you have questions, search for answers there.
About this blog
The WebLog is a new feature of the Expert Zone. The Recent Blog Posts feature on the home page displays entries from Microsoft employees writing in this and other blogs of interest to home users and Windows XP enthusiasts. We have bloggers from many parts of the Windows organization at Microsoft, from different divisions and different roles within the company.
The blog is not a great support forum. If you need help, please see the resources above or elsewhere on the Expert Zone, the Windows XP Web site, and the Microsoft Support Web site.
We're considering the best strategy for comments on the blog. Meanwhile, give us feedback in this Newsgroup Thread.
Truly,
Chris Norred, technical editor
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
By Sandy Hereld, Microsoft Technical Writer
Windows customers get help in many ways: online help, phone support, the Knowledge Base, the Expert Zone, Windows Update -- but one of the best sources of help still is the Windows XP newsgroups. Thousands of users a month turn to the Windows XP support newsgroups (microsoft.public.windowsxp.*) for help, or just commiseration, when something goes wrong with their computer. The Windows XP newsgroups are valuable for Microsoft, as well: they're a chance to help and communicate with customers, and a rich source of information about customer pain. Maybe too rich -- even compared to blogs, newsgroups can be more than a little chaotic, and postings can be a little hard to parse.
So here we are, working on Longhorn, trying to decide which parts of Windows users need the most help on. Say that from investigating the query logs, we know that a lot (make that a LOT) of our users ask questions about "sync" or "synchronize". But believe it or not, more than 1/2 of those queries use just the one word, "sync". We'd have to be mind readers to know exactly what sorts of tasks users are trying to do around sync -- or, what sorts of users (home users vs. corporate users; new users vs. experienced ones) are trying to do those tasks.
That's where the newsgroups come in. At the moment, it's a challenge to sift through all the postings to find the nuggets of information that will help us serve users better. But we're working on strategies to help us efficiently look through all of the newsgroup postings for the last year, find posts that mention "sync", and then dig deeper into those posts until we're clear what sort of issues people commonly have with sync -- and which types of users have which types of problems. Then all we have to do is write help content that answers those exact problems, written specifically
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Jun 04, 2004
By Sandy Hereld, Microsoft Technical Writer
Assistance Search is hard. I'm sure I'm going to come back to this a lot, but the longer we work at this, the more complicated it seems.
Google is the search gold standard at the moment. But searching the web is actually a very different task than searching a relatively small content set, such as a set of assistance content (or the set of content on a user's computer).
In Google, if you search for "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard", you get one set of results. If you search for "Move all of your tasks to another computer", you get an overlapping but essentially very different set of results. When you're searching Windows Help, we want you to get the same results for both queries.
Getting the correct results aren't enough if you don't recognize the results, for both queries. That is, if you search for "Move all of your tasks to another computer", and you don't actually know the name of the feature, getting the perfect result "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard" doesn't actually do you any good. We have the query logs -- we know that people ask for tasks using very different terms and questions. When we have three or four very different titles for the exact same Help task -- how do we show all of those task titles?
In Windows XP, applications that ship with Windows (think Notepad) have their own standalone Help. Unfortunately, we know that once users have opened a Help window with a search box, that they'll then use that search box to ask any computer question that comes to mind. So for Longhorn, do we want to make all Help available from (our) application Help, even if it might make searching for Notepad specific content slightly less effective?
Right now, in these final months before Beta 1, we still have more questions than answers. But we've done a huge amount of work since XP shipped, and right now, I can't wait to get people to actually try out our early search efforts and start giving us feedback.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Posted Jun 02, 2004
By Gail McClellan, Windows Media Knowledge Center team
This morning we posted the technical beta release of Windows Media Player 10. We've made a lot of great changes to the Player including a streamlined UI, lots of online Music Store choices and the Auto Sync feature. Auto Sync is great because it enables seamless, automatic synchronization of music, video, and even recorded TV and photos to supported portable devices. Additionally, we have posted beta editions of our software developer kits (SDKs) for Player 10 , Windows Media Rights Manager and Windows Media Device Manager. Remember that this is a really early version, but I am very excited about the new features and functionality. If you would like to check it out, visit our website at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/default.aspx#download . If you decide to try it and have some feedback, please send it to our newsgroup at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/community/newsgroups/WindowsMedia/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windowsmedia.beta&lang=en&cr=US .
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Posted May 20, 2004
By Chris Norred, tech editor
Last weekend, camping in teepees on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon, I introduced myself to a guy who asked what I do for a living. When I told him that I'm a technical editor at Microsoft, he responded as most do: "Oh, YOU are the SOB." My point is that it's hard to escape the fact that many people are dissatisfied with the technical information you get.
We need to do better. Back at work this week, I was reminded why it's such a challenge. Editor Megan Morrone is reviewing some older how-to articles on the Windows XP Web site. Many of these were written 3 years ago or more. Megan noticed a problem in an article on Remote Assistance.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gethelp/remoteassist/viaemail.asp
When she followed the steps, her computer displayed a warning: A program is trying to access e-mail...If this is unexpected, it may be a virus...
The how-to article didn't mention this warning. Megan wondered: "How can I assure people that they’re not opening themselves up to hackers ?"
The answer came from a technical writer on the Microsoft Office Outlook team: "This is the security code that Outlook added a couple of years ago in a security patch," he said. He recommends that you click YES on the warning and allow Remote Assistance to access e-mail for one minute.
The challenge is that, assuming we knew the patch for Outlook would change the way Remote Assistance works, we didn't update the Remote Assistance article. In reality, Remote Assistance will work differently for people using Outlook, than for people who use another e-mail program. So the how-to article is still accurate for many people, but not all of them. One way we can do better, in my opinion, is to keep an eye out every day on the questions people have about their computers, and respond every day in print, because the best answer yesterday may not be the best today. I hope this blog can help.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Posted May 07, 2004
By Chris Norred, tech editor
Yesterday I wrote that MVPs, the online citizens who volunteer their time helping other users learn about computing, had been getting more questions from new users who are attempting complex hardware upgrades like replacing motherboards. I thought it might be a trend. Today, I get a report from the Microsoft User Experience (MSX) team that says otherwise.
The User Experience team includes the people writing Help for the next version of Windows. They're conducting a long term study on the computing habits of 5,500 home PC users. The researchers examined the same question raised by the MVPs: Given that hard drives and RAM are now sold at Best Buy and Walmart, are more consumers attempting hardware upgrades?
Their answer: Nope. Only 5 percent of users in the study upgraded RAM and none upgraded hard drives in the last 9 months. To be fair, the research report came out in March and it acknowledges that its data comes from a small time period in the 4.5 year average lifespan of a PC. On the other hand, home users in the MSX study are expected to be a bit more advanced than average home users.
This dichotomy shows how difficult it can be to determine what a couple hundred million computer users really need to know, and it shows the impressive steps Microsoft's Help writers are taking to figure it out.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Posted May 06, 2004
By Chris Norred, tech editor
The hottest discussion in the Microsoft public newsgroups this week has been about replacing motherboards in Windows XP.
Replace Mobo in XP??
You can see a list of the most active discussions on the Windows XP Expert Zone Community site.
Replacing a motherboard in a computer is a pretty complex procedure. And not long ago, this kind of discussion was only heard among engineers and advanced computer users. But last month at the Microsoft MVP Summit, many of the volunteers who spend time online educating the world about computer issues, mentioned a new trend. They're seeing more questions from fairly novice computer users who are trying to install new motherboards, new hard drives, RAM, etc.
With that in mind, take a look at the Sunday newspaper. Advertisements for motherboards, ATA hard drives, Firewire and USB drives, video cards, sound cards, and so forth are no longer limited to a little space at the bottom of the back page in the business section. Full-color pull out ads from Fry's, Best Buy, and all the other retailers feature these PC components that require you to crack the case and bloody your knuckles. Geekiness is mainstream. At the same time, the economy stinks, and generally, it saves money upgrading an old computer a piece at a time.
If you're shopping hard for a bargain mobo, or other component, there's a chance it comes without much in the way of helpful instructions. Thankfully, the community of other computer users is online, willing and ready to help. In a newsgroup, forum, chat, or Web site, you can quickly find help from somebody who's been there, had the problems, and worked through them.
If it's a motherboard that you're struggling with, a lot of MVPs recommend MVP Michael Stevens great article:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Posted May 5
By Chris Norred, tech editor, Expert Zone
If you missed the NOVA TV episode on technology in the Iraqi War, you may want to check it out on the Web. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wartech/ It reruns Saturday in Seattle. The Web site lists your local PBS schedule. (The transcripts aren't available for a few weeks.)
There is a segment about "network centric warfare" and several quotes about this being the "laptop war" and the "chatroom war." Soldiers on the front lines have laptops networked to each other and to satellites and other sources of information. Soldiers communicate online and keep track of their positions, other units positions, and enemy positions. On the plus side, networked warfare has greatly reduced friendly fire deaths compared to the first war in Iraq. On the horrific side, when the technology fails, the consequences are...
I don't want to sound detached, nor do I want to start a discussion of the War on the blog. But I was stirred by the show, and by the thought of soldiers making split-second, life-and-death decisions, based on a reliable, networked personal computer.
If you're a working stiff like me, it can sometimes be hard to keep perspective. I edit a Web site encouraging people to chat about computers. I don't invent new features, or solve technological problems. But the end goal, even for a Web site editor at Microsoft, is to make technology better for people.
On my list of reasons for coming to work every day and doing the best I can, I'm going to put these young men and women trusting their laptops in Iraq.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
By Gail McClellan, writing manager, Windows Media Division
I'm amazed how much education has changed since I was in school. I wasn't even introduced to computers until high school, and here last week I was in my son's second-grade classroom setting up a video camera so they can film a reenactment of the Lewis and Clark journey for a school assembly! I showed the teacher how to use Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 to combine slides that have text along with the video, so they could show dates, place names, and other facts about the expedition. If you're interested in using Producer yourself as a teaching aid, there's information on our Knowledge Center Web site that walks you through the process (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/videolaunch.aspx?id=8). In a short video, Jason (the son of one of our team members) explains the steps he took to create his video presentation about a famous European battle. There's also an accompanying article describing the process that you can print out.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
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