MSDN/TechNet forums for SharePoint at http://mssharepointforums.com - the place for Q&A and discussions!
Since the SharePoint 2007 products (WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, and SPD 2007) released about 11 months ago, there has been a tremendous amount of Q&A and discussions in numerous blog comments, in several major public e-mail distribution lists, in a handful of newsgroups, in dozens of web forums, and in countless private corporate e-mail distribution lists. From what I can tell though I must admit that I haven't done extensive research, there's quite a bit of duplication in the topics being asked about or discussed.
Here's an inference of duplication in the blogosphere based on a comparison of posts about SharePoint on blogs with any authority against blogs with some authority as reported by Technorati.
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Blogs with any authority (i.e. all blogs)
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Blogs with some authority
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As you can see, the graphs are similar, but the scale is almost 3 times smaller for the blogs with some authority. Does that mean roughly 2/3 of blog posts about SharePoint are redundant? I don't know if the ratio is as high as 2/3, but I do believe that there's a lot of duplicate content out there. If you have any constructive thoughts about this, please leave a comment.
So, what does all that have to do with forums? Well, it has become very natural and convenient for people to have Q&A and discussions in the comment streams of blog posts like I've just encouraged you to do in the previous paragraph. However, as the number of comments increases and multiple forks occur (here are a couple of examples), the distinct answers and discussion points get lost, and even search engines like Google and Live Search become less reliable in showing relevant comments in their search results.
Forums to the rescue! And now there's a friendly URL for you to get to them much more quickly: http://mssharepointforums.com.
Forums have the flexibility of allowing discreet questions to be differentiated from open ended discussions (see "Message Attribute" in the screenshot below) as well as useful answers from mere replies.
Conveniently, when creating a new message, the "Alert Me" option is checked by default, so you will be notified via e-mail whenever the message receives a reply.
Once your message has been posted, the ability to have a rich, extensible set of metadata is a key advantage that forums have over newsgroups. Shown below is the current list of icons based on one or more pieces of metadata that enhance the overall user experience in the forums by enabling users to quickly spot a particular type of thread while browsing or searching for a specific topic. Note that the SharePoint forums have not been enabled with all of the metadata options below, particularly the ones for "customer bug" and "product suggestion".
A common complaint that I've received from long time users of newsgroups is that forums don't provide sufficient offline access. While I must acknowledge that newsgroups still have the advantage here (and it's likely the only one remaining), a growing number of newsgroup veterans has found the use of RSS feeds (for one-way only offline sync) in the forums to be an acceptable tradeoff against the two-way offline sync provided by newsgroups due to the benefits offered by forums mentioned above and more which I will outline below. To subscribe to the RSS feeds, look for the following icon in any of the forums.
For answers to frequently asked questions about the forums, go to http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/languages/en-us/docs/faq.aspx?siteid=1.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of forums is the growing number of Microsoft personnel monitoring them and responding to questions. A few months ago, I kicked off a coordinated effort across multiple SharePoint oriented teams at Microsoft, including Technical Product Managers, Program Managers, Testers, Customer Support Services personnel, and Premier Field Engineers, to have an individual objective of answering two "high impact" questions in the forums each week and to jointly pursue a goal of 30% overall answer rate each month. I'd like to report that along with the help of a handful of SharePoint MVPs, we have increased the overall answer rate in our forums from 16% in July to 23% in August and 20% in September, but I won't be happy about it until we can sustain a 30% or above answer rate, which I hope will happen within the next 6 months. Considering that the average answer rate for all Microsoft forums combined is about 60%, I believe that the SharePoint community deserves at least half of that average! Note that all of our many sales, marketing, support, consulting, and community channels have been overwhelmed by the success of SharePoint, so while we aspire to ultimately meet or exceed the 60% average, we're being realistic with our 30% goal because our support efforts must be focused first on addressing the needs of paying customers.
How can you help?
- First, post your questions in the appropriate forums, so the subject matter experts monitoring their respective forums can much more easily see them.
- Second, when you see a reply that is a satisfactory answer to your question, click the "Mark as Answer" button for it as shown below, which will enable others to more easily find it, increase the overall answer count, and ultimately the monthly answer rate in our forums.
If you're not the person who asked the original question, but you feel that a reply is an adequate answer or at least helpful to you, then click on the "Yes, (this was helpful)" button for it as shown below. Although this won't increase the answer count, the metadata will be reflected in the Thread Icon, which may be helpful to others.
- Third, if you've built up some expertise in SharePoint or if you happen to know the answer or can point to the answer for a question that you see in the forums, then take just a couple of minutes to type and submit a reply.
- Fourth, if you want to help others in a more significant way, then plan on spending about 30 minutes each week (that's just half of a lunch break!) to look for high impact questions that you might be able to answer. High impact questions are those that would be returned after the filter and sort options shown below are set within a forum. This is the approach that I've recommended to SharePoint MVPs and Microsoft personnel, who are helping to boost the answer rate in our forums.
What's next?
In Q1CY2008, the answer count in our forums will get a significant boost when the "managed newsgroups" programs on MSDN and TechNet convert from using their current list of newsgroups to the SharePoint forums. The MSDN program is available in English for MSDN Universal, Enterprise, Professional, and Operating Systems subscribers to receive free technical support on select Microsoft technologies. The TechNet program is available in English for TechNet Plus and TechNet Direct subscribers. Today, many of the questions being asked via these programs duplicate those in the forums, but the answers provided by MSDN/TechNet personnel are not as easily accessible due to the newsgroups' lack of metadata and lower search relevance.
Lastly, Microsoft will continue to invest in improving the forums infrastructure in terms of functionality (e.g. the development of a 2-way offline sync feature within the next 6-9 months) and scalability (e.g. brand new hardware will be deployed to reduce the intermittent performance issues that some people have been experiencing recently). And I will continue to drive the use of forums as the primary community resource for Q&A and discussions about SharePoint. Although it would be practical for you to leave any feedback about this topic as a comment for this blog entry, I would strongly prefer that you use the newly created "SharePoint - Community Advancement" forum for this and other topics about improving or expanding the worldwide SharePoint community though blogs, forums, social networking, conferences, user groups, code camps, etc.
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