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Your questions: What the heck are you doing at Microsoft and what is CPE?

I was asked today: "just what are you doing at Microsoft these days? And what is this CPE thing I read about"

More of the same actually, as I originally noted here. (As well as this humourous look.)

In short, I work with product and services groups across the company to improve satisfaction with our customers and partners.  These customer-focus efforts are some of key tenets of our work that we refer to inside Microsoft (in both the business groups and SMSG) as the Customer and Partner Experience (aka CPE, another $MSFT TLA). More on the work we do at Microsoft to improve the Customer & Partner Experience – or CPE at the company – can be found in this Executive Summary and in my succinct post here.

Related to CPE is the work we do on the Microsoft GRS.

Uh oh, another Microsoft three letter acronym (TLA ;).

Every year, Microsoft turns to the Microsoft Global Relationship Study (GRS) to better understand the customer satisfaction our customers and partners though their thoughts, concerns and ideas. Their feedback has helped increase our understanding of their business needs, improve our products, and make it easier for them to do business with us. We focus on the results of the survey (and other research, such as product satisfaction) and make key changes. More information available at http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/grs/default.aspx.

And as Eric noted in his post, Microsoft also has many sites available "to share your experiences and connect with Microsoft to find solutions, learn about resources and much more." Here are a few:

 

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Tags: misc, CPE, Microsoft, Windows 7, customer satisfaction.

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How to sync files like notes and tasks on your Windows Phone 7

As I noted in my post with tips on moving from an iPhone to a new Windows Phone 7, I also touched on how to sync several files – namely notes. A number of folks asked how to sync notes and files with your new Windows Phone 7.  There are different ways to sync files on your phone, depending on the type of file and where i’s stored. To learn more, take a look at the article on syncing files with your phone.

I’m a huge OneNote fan and OneNote Mobile lets you take notes and sync existing OneNote notebooks with your new Windows Phone 7. It integrates easily with Windows Live SkyDrive (I love having 25GB of free online storage in the cloud).

To sync a notebook on Windows Live SkyDrive for the first time

  1. On Start, flick left to the App list, and then tap Office.
  2. Flick to OneNote, and then tap All .
  3. Tap Refresh.

  4. Tap Yes in the Sync with SkyDrive? message box. Wait while you’re signed in with your Windows Live ID.

  5. Afterward, a personal notebook named Personal (Web) will be created in your My Documents folder on Windows Live SkyDrive and synced on your phone.

  6. Type your notes.

For more info about saving Office documents to Windows Live SkyDrive, see Save a document to Windows Live from Office 2010 on the Microsoft Office website. For more info about getting started and using OneNote Web App, see Introduction to OneNote Web App on the Microsoft Office website.

You can also read Notes on Office.Live.Com – there’s more than one way to skin a cat (so to speak). An easy way to view Outlook Notes on my Windows Phone is by using my folders on office.live.com. In Outlook, I can click on a Notes file and save as a .txt file, which in turn I can post to my SkyDrive (aka, office.live.com) and view on my phone.

image

For information about syncing notes between your phone and SkyDrive, see Use Microsoft OneNote Mobile.

Also see this post from Julie, one of our MVPs, on pocketprimer.com on sync’ing tasks with Remember the Milk.

Windows Phone 7 does not include a tasks application and there’s no way to sync Outlook tasks to the device.  Even if there were a way to sync tasks, there’s no place to store them once they get there.  This to me is one of the greatest deficiencies of windows phone.

A few years ago I signed up for a free “Remember the Milk” (RTM) account.  At the time I didn’t have a prevailing reason to move my tasks to the cloud and there was no windows mobile support for RTM, so I didn’t seriously consider using it. 

But now with windows phone 7, I had a strong incentive to find a different way to work with tasks on my phone, so I rummaged around and found my RTM login credentials and took another look at this well known, well regarded, cloud-based tasks application.  I figured I could at least have access to my tasks through RTM’s mobile website.

Then last week, I discovered WinMilk in the Marketplace (in the Productivity category). I downloaded it to my phone, set up my Remember the Milk login credentials and all my tasks information synced beautifully to my phone.

 

Tags: articles, what I read, blogs, Microsoft, travel tips, Windows Phone 7.

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Up for auction: Halo’s Master Chief costume for the Microsoft Giving Campaign 2010

clip_image001The Giving Campaign Auction is in full swing, and I’ve posted an item in time for Halloween: a kid’s Master Chief costume! (folks at Microsoft should search for auction item 3365.)

Last year I offered a number of cool items that netted quite a bit for the Giving Campaign. (http://bit.ly/2Wh2Gw) This year I’ve been busy and haven’t had the time to wrangle up a bunch of items, (tsk, tsk) but I’m hopeful for this one. It’s the well-worn and “as seen on TV” costume from the Halo series. Folks at the company might’ve seen this Spartan wandering the halls at Microsoft in the past, filling a large pillow case with candy. Sadly, the boys have outgrown this trusted costume so up it goes on the auction block for charity (auction ends 10/27).

This costume features a full suit, gloves, custom-fabricated Spartan helmet and (where allowed 😉 foam battle rifle. The helmet is hand-made and fiberglass coated, as is the rifle (it was a quick assemble).  Our son made the local and national news in this getup. Sizing is for a 7-9 year old.

BTW, I’ll match dollar for dollar the winning bid. So, Microsofties: bid high to see your bid turn into a 4X donation!

(Please note that the large retail package and child pictured are not included in the auction. 😉

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When it comes to Tweeting, be thoughtful

As noted in my posts Surviving TechReady 11 in Seattle and from MGX Atlanta 2010…

‘Nuff said:

silence - tweeter

Credit goes to hongkiat for the blue bird image.

Tags: Microsoft, Atlanta, MGX, travel tips.

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A few examples of how Microsoft product groups integrate the voice of customers into the development cycle

j0402594A couple of years ago, Steve Ballmer talked about in his email to customers how Microsoft can do a better job of serving its customers. One of the ways we did this was through the creation of the Security Development Lifecycle (aka SDL) in 2004, which helps to improve the security, privacy and reliability of the company’s software. Today I shared with one of our teams today the links to Steve Lipner’s book on The Security Development Lifecycle and an overview of the Microsoft SDL.

In addition to the SDL, I thought that I should also reference a couple of the following available documents on how a couple of our largest product groups integrate the voice of customers at key touch points throughout the software development lifecycle.

Integrating customer feedback during the Windows 7 dev cycle was critical to its success. As you’ll read in this post, the need to include the voice of the customer starts before we’ve written any code, with feedback from our OEM and ODMs, consumer and commercial accounts at all levels. When you have a product like Windows that serves such a large set of customers, we work hard to ensure that the OS release serves the broadest set of needs.

During the Windows 7 development cycle, we featured in this post an overview of the Windows Feedback Program that allow us to bring the voice of the customer into the development process.  And a practical application of how we use CEIP was provided in this post when we considered how to approach and present UAC in Windows 7, by examining customer feedback and telemetry. (You can also find more info here on the CEIP )

Given that we RTM’ed Microsoft Office 2010 has RTM’ed (more on this at http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/) let me also shine the light on that team: see Shawn Lipstein’s post on the Office engineering blog gives you such great insight on how our usability labs in the CEIP impacts the drive research and insight into everything we do.

 

 

Tags: Microsoft, how to, Windows 7, Office 2010, feedback, customer feedback.

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