Sure, you're a seasoned IT professional.You work long hours on the job, and you try your best to keep on top of the various technologies that comprise your workplace.When a new product is introduced into your environment, perhaps you read a book about it or take a tutorial.When a problem crops up on your network, you head straight to Windows IT Pro or Google and see if you can find some kind of solution.
Or perhaps you do that and more. Perhaps you're a more involved IT pro. You like to get out to local user groups and attend conferences. You enjoy spending your rare free time trolling forums and blogs to find solutions to complex problems, and you enjoy helping your IT peers when you can. Your interaction with the IT community is dynamic.
Which kind of IT pro are you? Microsoft hopes you're among the latter, and frankly, we at Windows IT Pro hope you're that kind, too—because, as you'll see, we've found that your commitment to community goes hand in hand with your happiness as an IT pro. And we love happy IT pros.
What does community mean to you? That's partly what we hoped to find out in our 2006 industry survey. To answer that question here, I'll explore key survey results and get some IT pros' views about their community activity. But let's start with a little context—straight from Redmond.
The Microsoft Community Push
In 2002, Microsoft had something of an epiphany. As Karen Forster wrote in " Corporate Insecurity, the Magic Mirror, and the Emperor's New Clothes," March 2006, InstantDoc ID 49334, Microsoft recognized that "customer satisfaction among IT professionals was shockingly low." Open-source alternatives to its products were growing in popularity, and the company was dealing with an arrogant, control-freak reputation. Since then, Microsoft decided to start paying more attention to its customers and try to develop a community around its technologies and products.
Of course, community is the hallmark of open-source solutions, exemplified primarily by the sprawling Linux community, full of energy and creativity. Microsoft, yearning for exactly that kind of dynamic interaction, has since exploded with employee blogs, company-sponsored user groups, and feedback mechanisms. You might not think that community is something you can engineer by sheer force of will, but this is Microsoft we're talking about.
Time will tell how committed Microsoft is to its latest obsession, but for now, the community renaissance in Redmond is working. One of the more interesting aspects of this situation is the unspoken parallel between "satisfaction" and "community"—a parallel that begs some investigation.
Your Community Outlets
IT pros can interact with their community in a variety of ways. You can attend local user groups, participate in newsgroups and forums, attend technical conferences and seminars, sign up for Web seminars, frequent tech blogs, and visit the multitude of IT-related Web sites across the Internet. We sought to determine your favorites.
According to the survey results, 53 percent of you belong to a local user group, and 57 percent of you belong to a Windows newsgroup or forum. The next most popular method of community interaction—at 35 percent—is to attend a conference or seminar. For a full listing of your favorite community outlets, see Figure 1. But in this year's survey, we wanted to get more specific. What really are your favorites? As for newsgroups and forums, some favorites include ActiveDir.Org, Ars Technica, CNET.com, CodeProject, ISAserver.org, ITtoolbox, MR&D (Mark Minasi's reader forum), Microsoft's forums and newsgroups, MSD2D, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), myITforum.com, PatchManagement.org, Tek-Tips Forums, the Australian Whirlpool technology forums, and our own Windows IT Pro forums and article-comments areas.
What about blogs? Although one respondent exclaimed, "I hate that word!" and many of you simply marked "None" for this category, you can't deny the importance of the blog in the IT community. According to our survey, IT pro interest in blogs has jumped in the past year: In 2005, only 9 percent of respondents said they read, wrote, or responded to blogs. This year, 30 percent participate. You'll find some of the more popular at Engadget, InfoWorld, Mark Russinovich's and other blogs on TechNet, and a plethora of Microsoft team blogs—particularly the Scobleizer blog and You Had Me At EHLO, the Microsoft Exchange Team blog—giving further credence to the effectiveness of Microsoft's community-building efforts. As for other online communities, popular sites are Digg, Experts Exchange, Slashdot, and TechRepublic.
Attending tech conferences and seminars is obviously a better way to get some face-to-face contact with your peers. As a group, you've attended—or plan to attend—all sorts of professional events, conferences, and trade shows, and the most popular are regional Microsoft events, followed by third-party product conferences and seminars, local user group events, and Microsoft TechEd. For a full picture of the conferences that you value, see Figure 2.