What a great first week please keep the feedback coming!

I can’t believe the tech preview has been out for over a week already!  On behalf of all of the Devs, Testers, & PMs on the OneNote team thank you for testing out the next release of OneNote and Office.  Your feedback, input and bugs are incredibly valuable to us.

On our team we have always tried to have a connection with our customers by listening to them and engaging you all as much as possible.  We are reading the newsgroups, reading the blog posts you all say about OneNote and even John setup a Twitter feed for us (I personally love this).  Now that we have released the Office 2010 Technical Preview we are doing the same thing with the 2010 feedback.  We have assigned people on the team to be on duty to look over the feedback coming in through the various channels. 

I wanted to take some time to tell you how we handle all of the feedback that you have been sending us and letting you know that we listen to everyone and try and respond/react as much as possible.  Right now we have a few feedback channels available: Send a Smile (SAS), Newsgroups, blogs and blog comments.  Send a Smile is the little application installed along with the tech preview which lets you send a smile or a frown to us regarding something you saw.  There is an excellent post on the Office 2010 Engineering blog about Send a Smile.  Since we have released the tech preview there have been 300+ smiles&frowns sent to us and we look through each one.  We look for bugs, send interesting feedback to the people who developed the feature and we keep track of it in a shared notebook (more on this later).  Secondly we have the newsgroups where there is generally more of a discussion going on regarding various features.  The newsgroups are a bit less automated but allows us to have more dialog with everyone and I hope our responses in the newsgroup is useful we love seeing what you have to say.  Finally we look over some of the blog posts talking about OneNote 2010 and of course any comments on our websites we look at.

As you can see we have a lot of feedback coming in and I wanted to tell you about how we use a OneNote shared notebook to keep track of it all.  We have a notebook stored on SharePoint where we have a bunch project details and in there I have a “ON2010 TechPreview” section which is organised into weekly roll-ups  where we track all of the feedback from people like you.  Also Alex had a great suggestion that we use the Linked Note Taking feature so whenever I copy & paste someone’s details from the SAS website there is a direct link back to their feedback (which may include a screen shot, their email, etc).  Having this one place in a shared notebook is great and everyone can see what you all are saying.  We also send the roll-up via email to everyone on the team and send out a link so people can view it in the notebook.  It is a great use of shared notebooks, web research with linked note taking and unread & author sharing. 

So please keep sending the feedback and letting us know what you think, we are listening and we value your opinion!