The Xena Blog

When you buy a subscription to be able to get it activated right away rather than contacting MS and having to wait 5 days.

Here is one for you. My MSDN universal subscription is a download only account. That means, as the type implies, that I must download anything that I need. However, having to use the MS download manager is a pain when there are much better download managers out there that will allow me to download 3x as fast.

My suggestion/wish .. dump the current download manager and allow us to use whatever software that we want. The content is still protected via passport.

Create a better product navigation screen. Currenlty drill-down DHTML for the left navigation is not Firefox friendly.

Make possible to subscribe to software update and new.
I agree with Matt on improving performance to the left navigation pane.

Agreed - the navigation pane is pretty bad.

I like the current download manager. I get high speeds.
Don't remove it, just improve it.

I wish you could have multiple downloads at the same time in the download manager.

I also wish I could download Volume License versions instead of just receiving the media like MCP users can. I know there are issues but it would make life so much easier for me.

You can download multiple items by going to Options in FTM and setting the thread count to 2. This will allow you to do 2 simultaneous downloads (the current maximum). I have a feature request in to multithread the application, but no timeframe one when that might be implemented.

With respect to VL downloads, I'm totally with you. Right now our download centers are in Redmond, Dublin, Tokyo, and Singapore, and there are tax implications for downloading out of Washington state and Tokyo. (I'm grossly simplifying here, the issues are complicated). We're going to need to add a feature that says, "allow this file to be downloaded from XYZ location by customers with ABC attributes" to make this happen, so I don't think it's a short term fix.

Download Managers.......

I think what may be the best feasible approach, talk to the guys in the IE team, and get them to write a download manager spec, that can be securely called from sites with a certificate.

Or to do somehting like the IE mac team has, which is an integrated download manager for the product. It supports resume and automatic decompression.

Or why not create a truly cross platform desktop based navigation and download executable which using client side processing will have a tree view of the components sortable by language or platform, fully searchable and integrated with the customers Physical DVD/CD subscription level so that they can lookup the disc, or if they do not have it, they can be prompted to download it.

This would make essentially a smart client that can update on demand or on startup, and would be a tiny (3-5 MB) download, or it could be delivered on the Index Disc.

The client should be able to do this:

-- Search Physical Subscriptions
-- Interface and manage help (VS.NET / VS6)
-- Search MSDN Downloads
-- Act as transfer manager
-- Retain cached copy of the TOC and update every two/three days or on demand
-- Determine based on the msdn login / id what subscription level and physical delivery level the customer has.
-- Built on .NET
-- Burn or Mount CD IMAGES using the IMAPI or CD Control Panel interfaces.
-- Manage and Retain a list of the downloaded files
-- Checksum the downloaded files.
-- Provide Tech support call interface (View My Calls / Call Me)
-- Search functions should be integrated as a single window or search option.
-- Provide an ActiveX or .NET based interface for searching or manipulating the environment securely.


Anyways - that's the way I would do it; Integration is my specialty.

Take Care --Jacob Alifrangis, CEO, LEAD Developer Braindonors.net

Thanks for the ideas - I'm actually in the UI spec review right now for the new Xena UI, and read your requirements verbatim to the product management team. This is an interesting vision, but would be a major product to build. Basically, you'd need to build the MSDN disc index, MSDN Library, Subscriber Downloads site UI and middle tier, Authentication/Authorization engine, File transfer Manager, and CD burn/mount utility as a single application.

To be fair, I won't be releasing this in the short or medium term, but I'll keep this in mind when thinking about the long term vision for MSDN Subscription content management.

You're welcome.

I'm glad that you had a chance to review these suggestions.

Need an integration expert?