Interview with the Curah Ninja Team - celebrating 1 year Curah!

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do?

We are the Curah! international team, located in Redmond and around the world, in Latin America, Europe, East Asia and Russia. This gives us the opportunity to work with communities around the world.

  

What are your big projects right now?

There is always a lot of work in Microsoft, in addition to Curah!, we focus on MSDN , DMC and TechNet  but we want to take this opportunity to focus in Curah!

 

What are your specialty technologies?

For Curah!, we focus on technical content, publishing, development, growing the Curah! technical community and managing all the processes surrounding Curah!, like SEO, business intelligence, program management, etc We have a lot of time and resources invested in Curah!, so Curah! is as important as any other project we have.

 

This week’s interview is focusing on Curah. What is Curah for? Who is it for?

Curah! is a new Microsoft curation service with a very specific purpose: to help people searching in Google or Bing find annotated collections of great content that specifically target common technical questions. Curah! is for everyone, itis fully optimized for the community, and anyone with a Microsoft Account ID can become a curator.

The steps for creating a new curation are fast and easy, and it is a great way not only to collect the best content on the web about some specific topic, but it also provides a platform for curators to share their expertise, tips, and insights about the topic and content assets that they curate.

We want to ensure everyone can leverage the best content out there, and great technical knowledge of the communities and all the folks within Microsoft. So that whatever the technology you are interested in, you can find something helpful  on Curah!.

 

What do you do with Curah, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

To build a curation service is just the start… Without strong technical communities, Curah! can’t reach it’s full potential and become an unbiased, reputable and trusted resource. Curators are the lifeblood of Curah!. They know the problems their customers are facing today and they know what content exists on the web that addresses those problems. We know that our MVPs and MS content publishing teams have great expertise and insight into our products and services and how customers use them, but this is the tip of the iceberg compared to what exists in all of our technical communities. We spend a lot of effort and time to evangelize Curah!, broaden its footprint and build strong world-wide Curah! technical community.

 

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

TechNet Wiki and Curah! are two platforms that are complimentary to each other. We publish a lot of Curah! related articles on the wiki and then create curations to reference that content. In fact our FAQ curation is a good example of how we leverage TechNet wiki platform with Curah!.

 

What are your favorite Curah articles?

We have many great curations that are created by different authors across various technologies and languages. On the Curah! home page you can view featured curations that were handpicked by our admins or popular curations favored by our users. It would be hard to name a particular favorite curation, I would say our favorite are the ones that help our users to resolve their issues and answer their questions, the ones that really help!

 

What Wiki articles have you contributed? What curations have you published?

 The majority of the articles we have contributed are related to Curah!. Here are few of them that I think might be interesting to our readers:

 

Who has impressed you in the curation community, and why?

We have many curators who are passionate, enthusiastic and really care to help others to solve technical issues through sharing their knowledge. For me it is always impressive to see the drive, dedication and efforts curators put in to produce high-quality curations and more importantly, to help their communities.

For example, Microsoft MVP Prasad Kulkarni has written 23 curations and is an enthusiastic supporter. He explained: “I am using Curah! just because to share my knowledge to world, to make Microsoft Technology popular, to help developers - and others in the technology world - to resolve their day to day problems.” Meanwhile, Gokan Ozcifci, not only contributed a number of great curations around SharePoint technologies, but also organized and lead a team to output a number of great curations for the Turkish community. The list goes on …

 

What does success look like for Curah?

We want Curah! to be viewed as a trusted, unbiased, source of the best content available for a given topic or area. To do this we need the human touch from folks who are passionate and knowledgeable to gather together what they consider the best information and resources and share it by creating great curations.

 

What do you want to see more on Curah (suggestions for development)?

Many features you see today on Curah! are customer-driven. We are always open to feedback and pretty agile on driving it to implementation. We would like to see more suggestions for features that would help us to bring more people onboard, build a stronger community on Curah! and make curators experience more positive.

Head over to Curah!, start creating your first curation!

Please join us in building content on TechNet Wiki and Curah!

And remember to Wiki while you work (and after you work)!!!

 

Ninja Peter