Microsoft Kicks Its Forums up a Notch

Visitors to Microsoft's Forums starting at the end of the past week could notice various subtle changes impacting the user experience from new features to the disappearance of functionality issues. The Redmond giant effectively kicked its forums up a notch by introducing release 3.4, designed not only to resolve bugs identified in the previous version, but also to bring new features. End users might as well enjoy the new additions to the Microsoft Forums, as the company is not planning anything new until late 2008.

Andrew Brenner, Microsoft Forums Product Planner, exemplified some of the new features that have been available to users since the end of the past week, including "Visual Updates. After listening to your feedback, we have made some enhancements for usability and accessibility to make our forum pages easier to read. Forum view - Moved 'New Thread' to filter bar, moving messages higher up the page, and added the number of results being displayed. Proposed Answer Updates - Proposed answers are more clearly differentiated from the true answer. Browse Users Updates - Updated to include avatars and user badges".

On the MSDN, TechNet, Expression, and Microsoft forums home pages a new functionality was implemented permitting persistent Expand/Collapse. This means that the users revisiting will find pages and categories in the same manner as their previous visit. Also related to the new Viewing capabilities offered with 3.4, Microsoft now supports a hierarchical "threaded" mode, on top of the old flat lists.

In addition, the "Mark All Read" option is available to label all the existent threads at a certain time so that the Forums filters only highlight new content as it is being added. Navigation enhancements also feature a new tier of categories in the Breadcrumb just under the Home page. And on top of it all, the Redmond company is also tending to users dependent on mobile phones for accessing Microsoft Forums. Mobile support spans not only to functions such as viewing forums, messages, etc., but also to posting new content.

"After release 3.4 our sole focus will be on performance and scalability, so feature work will take a back seat for a few months. We'll still fix important bugs, but there won't be significant additional functionality until later in the fall," Brenner concluded.