Office 2010 Professional blog sara-ford-open-sourc

Final week I attended BlogHer Business in New york Metropolis, and appeared on a panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford. Sara let me pepper her with concerns for the couple minutes in regards to the work she's doing with CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website. The Geek in question: Sara Ford The employment title: Program Manager,Office 2007 Download, CodePlex.com Clearly, open source + Microsoft = touchy topic with a lot of background. I'm curious how you strategy that. Do you put on your unique child gloves just before operate each day?
We want to develop a internet site that supplies an excellent person expertise for open supply advancement on the Microsoft platform. We want folks to have the ability to collaborate in an on-line globe by providing them task management equipment along with a supply code repository. And,Office 2010 Product Key, they can track bugs, functions, and have discussion boards -- all the things that you'll need for an open, collaborative environment. When I'm engaging together with the open supply community, I say, "Hey, I was hired at Microsoft straight out of college -- I've only seen how proprietary software is built, so I'm curious about how open source projects function. Come and show me how it works." You use words like "open" and "collaborative" -- words that haven't traditionally been in the Microsoft vernacular. How have you seen the culture at the firm change, to where "open" and "collaborative" are now a part of your position?
When I was in college,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, I would find bugs while coding in Visual J++, and the only way to get assistance was to pay $250 to report the bug. If Microsoft confirmed your bug,Office 2010 Professional, your money would be reimbursed. That was my expertise — very closed. Pay Microsoft $250 in the hopes that your bug was valid and you could get your money back?! $250 was the same as my rent! No way I could do that. After I was hired on in Fall 2001, I started to see a shift, using the firm moving towards neighborhood and transparency and blogging efforts. I got to see teams starting to use newsgroups to respond to customer concerns. Then the Microsoft forums came around, and blogging gained in popularity, so it was a natural transition. Not only were we encouraged to engage together with the local community, but we had all these new ways to do so. It's taken a while, right? We're talking like five years ago, but now we have 5500 bloggers, and forums, and we have community. What lessons do you feel Microsoft has to learn from the open source local community?
One with the issues that I like about open source is the agile improvement style. Not everyone chooses agile development of course, but agile allows a really quick turn-around for customers — and since the open source community is so much about collaboration more than code, and with agile you can move really quickly. What do you feel like YOU have to learn from the open source community?
I went to this incredible presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 2006 by James Howison from Syracuse University, who spoke about how open supply communities succeed or fail. It was like being handed a textbook: "Here's your job. Now go do it." When I came back to Redmond a week later, I had gathered seven call-to-actions of how we were going to change our improvement model for the Power Toys for Visual Studio on CodePlex. I actually just submitted a paper for the O'Reilly Open Supply convention 2008, and it got accepted. It's called "Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem," and it's a summary of the lessons that I've learned, plus ideas about what the future of open supply might look like if there were no barriers in communication. Wish me luck. Oh,Windows 7 Pro, so you want some relevant links, hmmm? CodePlex Sara's blog CodePlex Team blog Lessons Learned Going Open Source using the Power Toys James Howison Power Toys for Visual Studio