The NDA Curse
The LCSKid had a recent post on entitled "How do I determine what I post" that I found very interesting. Tom normally blogs about things to do with Live Communications Server (the predecessor of Office Communication Server) but in this post he talks about blogging on beta software topics.
I totally understand where he is coming from. When dealing with beta software such as the next version of Speech Server you have to be careful what you say. Or at least some of us do. I've been using the pre-beta and beta bits for Speech server for over a year now. That means that most of my time is spent working with things that I can't talk about because I'm under a Non Disclosure Agreement. That means that I can't blog about the really neat Workflow activity I created. I can't discuss how I handle things differently than I did in MSS 2004 R2. I can't really tell you what the programming experience is like in 2007 other than to say I love it.
To make matters worse, as I understand it the beta users don't sign NDAs and thus aren't restricted in what they can say. Some are even blogging about things that I'm not allowed to blog about. That can be very frustrating. I hold back and they let it all loose.
Someone (I won't say who but they read my blog) said that I should just blog it anyway. Their philosophy was that "its easier to get forgiveness than permission" but I won't operate that way. Microsoft has been to good to me for me to use that approach in my blog. I've had a great ride with the beta versions of Speech Server and I really enjoy getting a heads up on the new stuff. If I'm not on the bleeding edge of development then I get bored. I won't do anything to jeopardize my relationship with the Speech Server team. I've got some great friends there and I'll just have to wait for a while before I can blog some things. They will tell me when I can blog.
I'm not really complaining but I just wanted you to know why I don't blog more about Speech Server 2007 and OCS. Its just that I'm limited in what I can say.
Now about that really neat Workflow activity....