Editor's Note - March 2001

Permit me to relate a short tale. It does, I promise, have relevance.

I went out on the 'Net last week to find a Groucho Marx sound byte for a contest I'm running for the TechNet team: "Say the secret word, the duck [will] come down and give you $100," he'd say on You Bet Your Life each week. In half an hour, using my three favorite search engines, I found hundreds of Groucho hits amid a few for Chico, Harpo, and Karl, lots of references to You Bet Your Life, but no sound byte.

I know two things: I know that I couldn't find it, and I know that I don't know if it was there to be found.

Sound familiar, O TechNet searcher? (I told you there was a point to the story.)

"You shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search."

Bill – Shakespeare, not Gates – said that in The Merchant of Venice. Four hundred years later, it applies to many Internet searches – and to all too many TechNet searches too. Search for "Windows" say, using a full-text search, and you probably get a hit in over half our pages. Our strength can also be a difficulty: TechNet has tens of thousands of info-nuggets (sounds like chicken tenders for knowledge workers).

Do we have the information you need? Probably. Can you find it? Not easily or reliably enough.

I hear you saying, "Steven, shut up and fix it!"

Would it were that easy – either shutting up or fixing the problem.

I think there are two related problems – search turns up too much dross, and it's not clear how to navigate via hyperlinks to the answer. I think we can fix the latter more quickly than the former.

We, in the preceding sentence, isn't the "royal we." It's you and me. TechNet and I need your help. See below.

"What is it you would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search."

Horatio is describing TechNet's navigation tools, or maybe the dead bodies all over the stage in Hamlet. Either way, it's not a pretty sight.

We want to organize the site around how IT folks work. You'll still be able to find our content arranged by product, but we hear your requests to address the tasks you're faced with every day.

I'm asking for your input on five approaches, the first three and a half of which are live on TechNet today.

1. The "I want to" box at the upper right of our home page. Is this a useful breakdown of things you want to do with TechNet? Do you look there? Now that I've pointed it out, will you start looking there? Do the key links – e.g., Search the KB – lead to useful groups of content?

2. Overviews of how to approach a subject. Look at our how-to overview of deploying Active Directory , for example. TechNet has a lot of Information Tenders – those darned info-nuggets – about various topics, aimed at different audiences and folks in different stages of the process. Would more breakdowns like this help you find the information you're looking for?

3. Ask for help in a newsgroup. We have about 90 newsgroups, some of which are both active and quite good. Actually, I'm amazed that people find them, given how hidden they are on the site. I was in this job six weeks – and had used TechNet myself for years – before I discovered them! So try them out. Ask questions where you need help; answer some where you're the expert. Which newsgroups are we missing? Which seem most or least useful?

4. Navigate by Task. That's the heading for a tree structure over on the left of our site. Right now, it's like the tree in the second act of Waiting for Godot – we're unduly excited because it's grown a few leaves. What leaves should we add to fill out this tree? What level of detail is appropriate? And how does it fit with…

5. List box of top IT tasks. Just below our navigation toolbar at the top of the page, we've added a drop-down box of 10-15 common IT tasks, linking as appropriate to either specific articles or how-to "link collections" as described in item 2, above. Do you find this useful? Does this complement or clash with our other navigation methods? Do you prefer the drop-down approach, or do you find the Top IT Tasks page more useful? Would you be angry if your task weren't included in our top 25? And while you're thinking about this, please help us choose that top-25 list.

Please send me mail about this stuff. I promise I'll read it and share it with the TechNet team. I can't promise to implement every suggestion, of course, but we will consider them all; we need good ideas. I won't even give your email address to our marketing folks, no matter how many Information Tenders they offer to feed me.

"A pain […] which dies in the search"

Shakespeare wrote about TechNet! (No one ever reads Cymbeline, so I figure I won't get caught here.)

Willy the Shake knew the trick to finding the answers is keywords. When Polonius asks Hamlet what he's reading, the great Dane replies, "Words, words, words." Most Microsoft products group these words onto an Index tab in Help. You can find topics by clicking on the indexing keywords. Shouldn't we do that with TechNet?

We probably should. I hear users asking loudly for this feature at focus groups and in email comments.

It's not quite as easy as it sounds, though. Someone has to go through each of the thousands of Information Tenders and figure out what the right keywords are – for each info-nugget and for TechNet as a whole. Too many keywords, and the index is unwieldy. Too few, and it's little help. Do it mechanically, and we wind up with thousands of articles linked to "Windows."

Today we're starting the process, although it will be months before this is baked enough to appear on the site. We will get there, however; we're listening to you.

"Why a duck?"

I've got a duck, a/k/a my daughter's bath toy, hanging via a pulley in my office, albeit with a free-lunch card rather than $100 around its neck. (Remember the Groucho story?) TechNet staffers who use the secret word in a sentence get treated to lunch. I can't tell you – or them – the secret word yet, but it's another way we're trying to make TechNet more useful to you. I hope to be able to share this new idea with you shortly. And if you have a secret word on how to improve TechNet, let me know. We succeed only when you succeed.

Steven B. Levy
Product Unit Manager
Microsoft TechNet