As of this morning all bets are off. The war has begun and by now you’ve noticed our opening salvo – a full on revamp off enConnected.
Just as with our previous update, enConnected Bellum – “War” in Latin began as an effort to remove the obstacles that the editorial team and I felt were holding the site back. Let’s talk about the challengers we faced and how this new version should help us overcome them.
As far as we’re concerned the biggest obstacle to enConnected’s growth this past year has been our utter lack of direction in the mobile space. This past March, we canned our subpar mobile design. At the time our original plane was to immediately replace it with another more versatile design – also to be mobile centric. Clearly, that didn’t happen.
As of today enConnected is available on any device that has a web browser. Using the power of media queries and CSS3 we’re able to present our content to you in a way that’s best for your screen resolution. It’s a better situation for us too! You have no idea how much of a relief it is to know we only need to build a feature for one code base going forward.
It’s our opinion that enConnected Social is one of our things that make us unique. With this version of enConnected we’re pushing the discoverability of these offerings to the next level.
The best enConnected Social we can have is the one that works on every one of the devices in which you might have something to say. As with the rest of enConnected Three, enConnected Social now fully scales to your device’s screen resolution. Yes, you can now join the Microsoft entertainment discussion on whatever device you desire.
The fixes didn’t stop there, as of this moment Facebook integration is now once again online and operating normally. Users will also benefit from a new ability to add pictures to your timeline and the site-wide activity stream.
We’re also introducing our new reviewers program to help you better sort through the sea of Windows devices and related services that are on their way. We want to enhance the conversation on these products not dictate it. You’ll also find a more open canvas in our reviews as well –while older reviews will render just fine using the new design, you’ll have to wait for the torrent of new review content before you’ll be able truly appreciate what we can do with it. Don’t worry, it’s coming.
It’s not all pretty code. We’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to make this the fastest version of enConnected yet including optimizing our database to better handle traffic and a partnership with a new CDN that we’ll be flipping the switch on later this week depending on the seriousness of any bugs that crop up. Speaking of bugs, please send us any that you find to theteam@enConnected.com or post them in our Backstage group on enConnected Social.
Much has been made about what Microsoft’s new products mean for technology enthusiasts and consumers. Will what Microsoft has done change the way people think of personal computers? Will Windows Phones truly inspire smartphone users to treat their devices as if they are a personalized extension of themselves? We can’t answer those questions. What we can and will do is create a destination to help you consider both of those questions for yourself with the tools in this release.
We’re enConnected, your destination for all things Microsoft consumer and the world might not know of our regiment now, but that won’t stop us from wining the war.
