Forum Discussion
Why is the Lounge so wild at the moment?
The term "wild" is far too mild — it's a complete mess.
Some features were even expired before the new version was released.
Any reasonable company wouldn’t dare to do something like this, but they’ve done it without hesitation.
The structure of this site feels like it was built as a summer hobby project by a couple of college students.
I believe this clearly shows how Microsoft truly views MCTs.
It's frustrating and disappointing.
- Allen
Community Manager
Welcome to the Microsoft Tech Community, I think the first thing I need to make clear is the Microsoft Tech Community (MTC) is not the same as the MCT Program. If you have a view to share about the MCT program then you would be best to address that with the team by posting in the MCT Cafe in the MCT Lounge.
With regards to the Microsoft Tech Community, we have grown over the last 8 years from a community supporting 4 products to almost 120 as of today. I would agree its allot more complicated than we would like and we are actively looking into ways to improve the UI/UX through streamlining the IA to leveraging AI to help users better navigate the site.
The problem is always how to facilitate discussions across a desperate, and growing, number of topic areas without over cluttering the UI. This is something we spend allot of time working on and trying to balance.
With the new UI we moved away from Community Hub Memberships, which basically didn't do anything, and toward following / subscriptions which, not only allows you to curate the topics your most interested in and have them delivered to your mailbox, but also builds out the homepage when your logged in to show the discussions from those spaces on the left rail.
Its a balance we still do not have right, I am quite prepared to admit that, and I am sorry that you feel your experience is so poor. If you have some specific feedback then I am always happy to hear it and take it into consideration for future projects.I would also like to know what features have been removed or you feel are missing from the experience today.
All the best and thanks for your contributions.
With 120 products in list with current navigation it could be hard to understand where to ask question. Not everyone could make a guess that with Excel 2019 question you shall go to Microsoft 365, with SharePoint to Content Management, etc. Search under Products returns nothing for above. Or SharePoint is not the product?
- Allen
SergeiBaklan So about 6 months ago SharePoint moved into a new community called 'content management'. I was concerned at the time that this wouldn't make sense to customers so I will be sure to include this feedback to the product team on our next sync.
If you search SharePoint and press return (from the home page) then you should see a discussion board with that name in the 'places results' on the right but otherwise your right it doesn't come up in the 'suggested' results when you first search.
Of course, although this doesn't change the value of the feedback, do keep in mind the majority of our users come into the community from search engines to specific threads rather than directly to the home page and navigate to a given tree of the community from there.Thanks again for your feedback.
