MSDN Connection: Getting the right information to you

This isn’t very architecturally focused, technical or even very earth shattering but it is something I have been moaning about for ever and someone has finally fixed. So what is it? It is the ability for people to register their interests with Microsoft and get a personalised web page and RSS feed.

To my knowledge this is the first time it has been done in Microsoft and it has been the result of heroic work by a few people here in the UK. Now, for the first time (drum roll) on the UK MSDN site you can say what topics you are interested in and get them sent to you via RSS. It’s called MSDN Connection:

https://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/

As I say technically this isn’t very earth shattering but organisationally for a company the size of Microsoft it is a huge thing to do. Just holding the back end data for people in our many and disparate customer databases (yes, we have multiple customer databases, just like everyone else!) and categorising and tagging the content are major issues. It has taken a huge amount of organisation to get all the different systems and people in place to make it happen.

Anyway I am really happy that we have managed to do it as I fervently believe that with the huge amount of information we have on our systems and the amount of spam people get we need to ensure that we just send the right stuff to our users and customers.