A new web-based newsreader to access 2,400 public newsgroups. Give it a try!

Our friend Laura John from MSDN just posted a nice blog entry about the new web-based newsreader many of us have been working on lately. mary Jo Foley recently published an article that announced the next-coming release of this web application. It shipped as planned June 8th.  Kudos to the Office product group, the MS.COM Platform and Operations teams who have worked like crazy in the last few months to ship this web-based newsreader. Kudos too to people in the product web sites, Technet and MSDN web sites who have worked hard to adopt rapidly and make sure that we would ship simultaneously across the dozens of web sites we have on MS.COM. And a big thank you to all the customers and MVPs who have constantly sent us feedback all along on how to build this application.

We know that many people will still prefer a rich downloadable client (like OE or others). But we created this version to make sure that everybody, even behind a firewall where the NNTP port would have been shut down for technical reasons, can still access the Microsoft publics newsgroups. For all the people who don't want or don't know how to set up a newsreader, or for those who know but are traveling or accessing the web on a different machine than their normal one, this is a pretty cool web application. In addition to that you can immediately filter the answered / unanswered questions, identify the posts from the Microsoft Valuable Professionals (MVPs), send feedback to Microsoft, get notified every time a new post appears on the thread / question you care about, view the threads identified by other community members as valuable. And there is much more. Go give it a try and tell us what you think.

Right now we think about the next version and about how to articulate this with a web-board type of online experience (more moderated, more private, more “personalizable” etc...).

For now, feel free to visit the main site here ; all the newsgroups can be accessed from the major product pages of MS.COM (ex: TechNet newsgroups page). Next step is to continue to deploy internationally. We will keep you posted.

More to come

.olivier ribet

[Via Microsoft WebBlogs]