Today we released our latest version of the Microsoft Tech Community and there are some important changes for you, which I would like to share.
Info Center becomes Community Lounge
When speaking to our users, it has become clear that, the purpose of the Info Center is not always clearly understood. Today we have renamed the Info Center to Community Lounge, which can be accessed from the navigation at the top by clicking Lounge. If you have access to more than one lounge, then the navigation will be a drop down called lounges and you can select the Community Lounge there.
The purpose of the Community lounge is to allow users to discuss and provide feedback on the Microsoft Tech Community. It’s also where we keep our getting started guides and our latest version of the code of conduct.
Community Event Leaders
In an effort to make it easier for Community Event Leaders to submit their events to our Community Events section we have changed how the event submission flow works. It used to be that to submit a community event you had contact our team to request to be recognized as a Community Event Leader, if you were not already granted this role.
Starting today anyone can submit a Community Event, we will review each event as it comes in to ensure the event complies with our terms of use and code of conduct and then we will either approve or decline the event as appropriate. Anyone who gets an event approved will automatically receive the Community Event Leader role.
The process to register as a Community Event speaker is unchanged and you should contact us for access to create a speaker profile.
Accessibility in the Microsoft Tech Community
Some of you have noticed that some of the colors on the community have recently changed. These changes are as part of our work to ensure we are compliant with WCAG 2.1 and this has meant we have taken another look at some of the colors we use from a color contrast perspective. This is a large piece of work and so you will see more changes in the months ahead.
We believe the Microsoft Tech Community should be accessible for all I.T. professionals and so this is very important to the work we do as a team. I will give a further update on our accessibility compliance work as we get closer to completing this work and share how our users can provide bug reports and feedback on any accessibility features via our Lounge Ideas board.
If you have any questions or any comments please do comment below
