Microsoft Connect, Send a Smile: your feedback & bugs
First of all I would like to say thank you! Many of you are submitting bugs and taking time to let us know what you think about OneNote 2007. Over the past few months as we have shipped Beta1, B1TR and Beta2 we have gotten a great amount of feedback from you all, our wonderful customers. We mainly have these avenues of feedback:
I wanted to give you all a quick rundown of what happens with the feedback that you all submit.
OneNote Newsgroup
With the newsgroup feedback parts of the team goes through all of the posts and looks for potential problems as well as suggestions and what people are saying. As the general beta-guy/customer feedback PM I have been looking @ most of the posts and I have forwarded them to the people who own those features. If there is a person complaining about ink I will send the newsgroup thread/post over to the people working on ink. When there were problems with note flags not being upgraded I looked into the problem and worked with the team to get a fix in. You get the point, I read your comments and they go directly to the people coding, designing and testing the features, your voice is heard.
Additionally other people on the team look through the newsgroup posts and report back weekly on what has been going on. We try and help whenever we can but we have some great people on the newsgroup (Patrick, Ben & Erik) who reply, we generally see what people are doing with OneNote and what people are confused about.
Microsoft Connect
For those of you who have submitted bugs on the Connect site you are our best helpers. You all have more types of computers and more interesting ways that you are using OneNote and we want to see the issues you all are facing. Each of your bugs are examined and we look to see if they are already fixed or if we can reproduce the problem with the most recent builds.
If there is indeed a problem we track the bug and it goes to a developer who will look @ your comments and make a fix. I know there have been many bugs that have come in and we work on the fix. Your feedback is key for this.
Additionally many of your submit suggestions for OneNote, which is great however there isn't much we can do right now. We are all focused on finishing OneNote 2007 and because of that we aren't get your suggestions in OneNote 2007. However please let us know what you think so that we can get great customer feedback for the next release.
Send a Smile
Finally there are Send a Smile reports, which allows you to send us a screenshot and your comments about what happened and what you didn't (or did like). Sadly most of the reports we get are frowns, which is understandable but I love hearing what people like about OneNote as well. That being said I look through all of your Send a Smile reports and I look for potential problems. Most of them we already know about but there are some great gems in there that I create a bug and start tracking it. Finally I take all of your comments and I send them out to the team and everyone reads them.
For more info about the Send a Smile program please see Jensen Harris' post: Where do the smiles go?
I guess the moral of the story is this: the OneNote team is listening to you. Your feedback goes directly to the people who work on the product and we love your feedback. There have been many fixes we have done based on your feedback. I can't discuss all of them but I will be able to in the near future. I think the OneNote team has a great customer connection and we are looking to maintain this relationship with you all. Again thank you.