No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

Custom Computers — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:07:17 GMT

IT WOULD SEEM, from research that moving things around and having so many LIVE LINKS AND BLOGS are alikened to a moving target to enhance usage. We find in discussions that a very small percentage of the public are currently aware of the

numerous WL Products.

We use and like very much the WL products we have but feel proper public awareness is an important issue Microsoft must address.

An Avocate

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

Kevin Briody — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:24:53 GMT

Hi Chris,

Thanks for noticing the change to our beta pages. I want to address your concerns. In short, this has no impact at all on our plans for future betas on any product or service. The site changes were done solely for marketing and operational reasons.

Moving the beta site over to get.live.com allows us to consolidate on one publishing platform (get.live) that is better set up for use to evolve it down the road than ideas.live.com was. Get.live.com also better reflects Windows Live branding – ideas.live went up before we were locked on that, so it had some inconsistencies. Finally, this allows us to have one less URL in use, generally a good thing.

In the course of making this move, some functionality available on the previous beta site was lost for the short term. For example, there is no distinct signed-in/signed out experience, and we cannot show how many invitations you have. We’re evaluating what is most important for the user experience here, what needs to be added in, etc.

On betas: We will continue to support open, closed and managed betas, just as before, with no change. Which product uses what type of beta, at what stage in the release cycle has always been the call of the individual product team, and that isn’t changing either. How and where you log in to check on your invitations and such might be different, but that’s it.

I hope this helps,

Kevin Briody

Windows Live

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

LosHavros — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:31:34 GMT

Yup Chris, I agree with your closing comment in the article. I hope the Windows Live team know what they are doing...

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

Chris — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:07:54 GMT

Orionll it seems that closed betas do not appear to be able to run from the new site, only public betas.

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

orionll — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:54:09 GMT

No I do not think they are stopping the betas because, if you go to http://get.live.com/betas/home you can see all the Windows Live Betas. I was re directed here and not to get.live.com. And also from your link I was re directed to get.live.com/betas/home.

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

aho — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:43:33 GMT

i think the new betas page looks better than the old ideas page anyway!

re: No more Ideas - beta policy changing?

Emexci — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:11:30 GMT

interesting news..