The JPK Experience : Announcing a new collaborative project

I've just had some input that says Microsoft will be killing off all NNTP support over the next three years. Thus all those wonderful NNTP based Newsgroups will go away. In its place will be web forums. In a related vein, I also read an interesting article by a MS guy: The JPK Experience : Announcing a new collaborative project.

I've been using NNTP newsgroups for around 20 years, and have achieved my MVP status as a result of my postings in various groups over the years. I've found NNTP to be lightweight, relatively ad free, and most importantly available off line via a powerful client (in my case Turnpike). The client (and there are a bunch if you don't like my choice!) makes NNTP very easy to use, although there is a bit of a learning curve (learning how to kill threads or posters, etc).

By comparison, the web forums are slow (60+ seconds to render a page is unacceptable), and very hard to navigate. To skim read a thread of say 20 articles could take 20 or more minutes (compared to seconds with Turnpike).  Each time I try MS's latest attempts to move NNTP to the web, I feel ill. The latest attempts are just as bad.

Jonathan says this time it's going to work. Sadly, he may be right, but only because MS is taking away the option to use NNTP. He also says that as the business owner he can't deal with NNTP. What the heck? I though business owners actually owned things. Unless the mandate to kill NNTP has been delivered from on-high. I note the reaction to JK's post has been just about entirely negative.

While I'm just one MVP, I am unlikely to place much content on web forums. I use them from time to time, when I can afford to wait for the contents to trickle down. But if you really want answers to questions, then use the newsgroups as long as you can. And in the mean time, why not tell Microsoft what you think?

If you believe NNTP should remain, why not email Steve Ballmer (stevb@microsoft.com) and tell him just how much you want NNTP.

Technorati tags: NNTP, Microsoft, MVP

TechNet Forums for Office 2007 and Vista/Longhorn Open For Business

Have a question about Office 2007, Vista or Longhorn>? Come on down to the TechNet Forums now featuring Office 2007 and Longhorn Forums. Sadly, for true IT Pros - there is no NNTP access yet. But come on over, set a spell and ask away!

Vista and Office 12 - IT Pro Support is Comming!

I spent some time today on a conference call around the support that Microsoft plans to provide around the Vista/Office 12 Beta 2 releases that are due out very soon. The idea is that there will be some web based forums, plus a bunch of stuff. The web only forums are to be moderated by an elite group of MCTs. This is a great reach-out to the community! While the concept of equipping beta users with great support is fantastic, there are some flaws in the approach, IMHO. First, there is NO support for NNTP based newsgroups - the web is the way and the only way. As a member of the Big-8 Managagement Board, I think this utterly sucks. Why on earth cut OFF an important avenue of support. Heck - Community Server handles this fine! But I suppose I would say all of this. Another concern is over the role of the moderators. It's one thing for a moderator to remove ads for Sindy's Eexxyy Syn Syte, but it's much different than enabling somone to edit the post or just silently delete it. The moderator is allowed, for example, to edit a post for profanity (I think the term was 'inappropriate language'). Inappropriate "to whom" was not answered thus this probably means inappropriate for anyone in a US Sunday School deep in the Bible Belt mixed with that of the Chineese censor :-(. I guess I find it unacceptable for anyone to tamper with my language or my words, even with total transparency - is a non MS employee really able to tamper with my copyright here? Sure - fix my typos (and $Deity knows that there are enough of these), but tamper with my words and you change my meaning a privalege I may not want to give a moderator I do now know. I don't think the team putting this together fully understood these points. But we'll see. In summary, full marks for what's comming in terms of Beta support. I can't give all the details just yet, but MS is really stepping up to the plate to help beta users. There are however some really blinkered views (no NNTP - what's up with that - which I hope to widen!

Monad Information and Where to Find More

In comment to a recent blog post, Mark asked where to go for more information about Monad, particularly newsgroups. A great question! When Microsoft released Monad Beta 2, they moved the discussions from a private beta newsgroup to the public newsgroups carried on msnews.microsoft.com and elsewhere. Specifically, MS moved all Monad discussion to the microsoft.public.windows.server.scripting newsgroup. You can get this group on either using NNTP from msnews.microsoft.com, or via Google groups.

Keeping Up

I had an interesting mail from an old friend today. She asked me how I keep up. We've been communicating off and on for years after meeting many years ago on a training course. We run into each other now an then - and it's nice to say hi. So Hi - you know who you are!

The question of keeping up is a good one. At one time, I relied mainly on network news (NNTP) and mail. Increasingly, I'm relying on online content. Since May, I've been playing with both blogging software and RSS readers (the intenet was to read and consume via RSS). I can see the arguments for RSS, and Feed Demon is a cool tool. I've also started using Google News Alerts. Email is, increasingly, just a vechicle for spam. And I'm tired of it. I was away for a week and must have had 1000 spams. Even with filtering kicking out about 40% of the mails received! Jeesh. I am finding RSS aggregators as a better way of looking at things, but it needs RSS feeds. I'd love, for example, to get google searches via RSS. But this is a topic for another day.