Hi all,
Its December already, phew! What a busy few months we have had with Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Tech Summits, remember if you have not booked your place its not to late to get your free tickets – click here to find out more.
Yesterday we released, what will be the first of a series of regular updates we will be making to the Microsoft Tech Community. The first step of this was to make some much-needed improvement to our community ideas board.
The aim of these changes was to make it less “Wordy” and more productive and so we have added a graphical breakdown at the top of the Community Ideas space of how many ideas we have in each state.
This allows you to quickly see how many ideas your fellow community members have submitted and where in the review cycle these ideas are. I know some of you have previously given your ideas in the discussion space but, going forward, all ideas must be submitted to the ideas board. To help identify the status of ideas we have color coded them.
You can now also sort the list of ideas by age, popularity and what’s trending. We’ve also added the ability to filter the list so that you can see only ideas in any of the above states and created an ‘at a glance view’ of popular ideas and your own ideas. These are on the right-hand side.
Of course, we can have the best Community ideas space ever, but it will only work if you submit ideas and our team responds to them. I have responsibility for the ideas space and so I will be working through your ideas and prioritizing them against our other work items.
How do you ensure your idea gets implemented?
In short, you don’t. It is not possible for us to agree to implement every idea we receive but we will read and consider every idea submitted. We will also prioritize ideas based on the weight of feedback we have from you. We try our best to update on the status of an idea as soon as we have more to share.
We still have some further improvements to make to the Ideas board, for example to make it clearer that you can only “upvote” or remove your “upvote” on an idea and not repeatedly vote the same idea up or down. Also coming soon, we plan to make it so you can click on the numbers at the top to filter the ideas below by the status you select.
What else was in this release?
- Bug fixes for specific browser issues
- We finished the roll out of correctly formatted larger numbers
- Changes to the UI for the “My Settings” area
- Behind the scenes performance improvements
What about the front page, when are you doing something about that?
Our community has grown rapidly over the last year and unfortunately as we have grown the time it takes to load the frontpage has increased. We took some steps in the last month to make the page load quicker and display the messages in that view after the page had loaded. This was only a short-term fix and we are working away on a new design for the frontpage of the community. The designs for this are just about ready and we are currently working to ensure we can deliver the new front page early in the new year. I will, of course, share more info on this later.
I would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the team and myself, to wish you all happy holidays and, as we say here in Scotland, slangevar for 2018.
Allen Smith
Community Manager