Content Publishing Class: Part One

I attended part one of a four-part class on content quality today. Each class is four hours long. Since it was the introduction class, we talked about pretty high-level stuff the whole time. We broke up into small groups to talk about what quality is and how quality content helps Microsoft, that sort of thing.
We also talked about how to gather customer feedback that we can use to improve the documentation. The Office team does a great job of that, and all the documentation teams are looking at ways to follow their lead. Office content contains a place for readers to rate topics and send comments that go to the writers (for information, see the topic "You talk: We listen and respond") Plus, if you opt in when you start Office Help, they can use Web statistics to see which articles are used most often.
I think it's great that we're moving in a direction that will help us get direct feedback. I hope readers are interested enough that they contribute—perhaps if they know that the feedback really does make a difference, it will help.
If you have any feedback for what you like or don't like to see in the documentation, especially Visual Studio documentation (and really especially Visual Studio Tools for Office documentation, since that's what I edit), please leave a comment on this blog.