TechNet 2.0 – Episode 7 – The Homepage

The TechNet 2.0 release is nearly here and soon you’ll be able to see the homepage displayed at technet.microsoft.com. The TechNet homepage has been challenging to use in the past because the IT Pro audience is so large and diverse.  TechNet never made consistent decisions about what kind of content we should be publishing there. As a result, the TechNet homepage has been pretty static. There weren’t a lot of updates to the page. Nothing changed, sometime for weeks.

With the new TechNet 2.0 homepage, we are making a stronger commitment to prioritizing news and information for IT Pros. You can see some of that already on our current homepage with the small “Today’s News” section and RSS feed.

With TechNet 2.0, we will increase our commitment to making the TechNet homepage a dynamic source of news that helps you judge what requires your investment of time to learn and how new information may change your job in the future. Below you can see the new page.

For major news and announcements, there will be a visual headline feature that provides super-easy access to information on major events, launches, and more.

Additionally, we’re enhancing our news feed to show the person who’s behind the news, as you can see in the feeds displayed on the page below. After all, even news from Microsoft actually comes from a real human. Grin.

What does TechNet mean by “news?” , Don’t expect to see juicy gossip. This isn’t etonline.com or something along those lines. New technical content like videos, webcasts, v-labs, trials, KBs – resources that help you get things done, get smarter, and be more successful -that’s what is news on TechNet.

There’s more. Remember the Troubleshooting helpers we discussed in Episode 4? We’ll have that on the homepage, because we know a lot of people come to technet.microsoft.com to research an issue they are trying to resolve. They may not know the product TechCenter URL, but technet.com or technet.microsoft.com is easy to remember, so we’ll make it easy to start troubleshooting from those pages, too.

You’ll continue to see our efforts to increase ease of navigation along the left rail of the page. With one click, you can jump into the major technical areas of the site and platform. You can also browse the tabs at the top of the page for access to things like the Forum area, Downloads, the Library, and soon the TechNet Wiki. The familiar navigational structure will still be there, even as the main body will change as news takes place inside and outside Microsoft. Yes, we’ll be incorporating more insight and opinion from outside Microsoft to help you make decisions, build strategies and prioritize projects based on the widest possible perspective.

News is just the beginning. We are starting to plan new experiences for the homepage that provide more in-depth content on important technical topics like Cloud Computing, Mobile, and more. Keep our home page in your reading list to stay on top of more waves of new features, enhanced programming and, we hope, the development of the most useful stop an IT Pro can make when judging the news of the day.

Question: What kind of topics would you like to see TechNet cover better?