Introducing WintellectNOW

Last week, we introduced WintellectNOW, a new on-demand learning service designed to make the same training content that we provide to Microsoft and other large customers available anywhere, any time.

Jeffrey Richter and a team of talented people at Wintellect designed and wrote the software, which we’re continuing to improve on a daily basis. We’ve done some streamlining on the registration process since launch, for example, and we have a cool library-search feature tested and ready to roll out to production. Videos are hosted by a third-party hosting service, while all the data the site uses, including the video metadata and registration information, is stored in Azure. We have some really cool stuff on the back end to make it easy for enterprise training managers to move people in and out of seats and to get metrics regarding seat usage, and of course, we offer volume discounts to enterprise customers. In short, we invested a lot of time and money into V1 of the software, and we’re already working on V2. We can’t wait to let the public see some of the stuff we have planned.

My primary job in launching WintellectNOW was to recruit authors and manage the editing, acquisition, and publication process. I was fortunate to find some talented authors who believed in what we’re doing and were willing to invest sweat equity into preparing the launch content. Sitting alone in a room and speaking into a microphone all day isn’t nearly as thrilling as leading a class of 50 smart developers or speaking to a conference audience of 500, but it’s gratifying to see the end results published for the whole world to see. This month, we’ll be publishing more than 25 new sessions and introducing several new authors. After that…well, wait and see. We have a few surprises in store and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for anyone!

Most of the sessions available on WintellectNOW require a paid subscription, but we’re committed to providing free content as well. Currently, you can view the following videos without purchasing a subscription:

• John Robbins deep dive into IntelliTrace, a talk that has proven wildly popular with our corporate customers
• Jeffrey Richter’s introduction to all things Azure
• My introduction to writing jQuery plugins

We’ll be publishing more free videos this summer and periodically rotating existing videos between the paid pool and the free pool. So keep your eye out for some great free content. And watch as the library expands to include individual sessions and complete courses on topics ranging from HTML5 and Azure to ALM and mobile development. Today is an exciting time to be a software developer, and we hope to help developers everywhere keep pace with the rapidly evolving landscape of software development tools and technologies.