Monday, May 15, 2006 10:19 AM
Jim Glass
Forums vs. Newsgroups
The CRM team currently uses newsgroups and message boards to provide a venue for customers and partners to communicate. A new solution, forums, is now available and we want to determine what the right answer is for our customers today. Some of the key criteria and features are considered below. Can you think of others?
|
|
Newsgroups |
Forums |
|
Question assignment capability |
No |
Yes |
|
Customer product suggestion capability |
Yes |
No |
|
Back-end admin reports |
No |
Yes |
|
Alert service |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Topics archived |
No |
Yes |
|
Search across all CRM sub-folders |
No |
Yes |
|
Offline viewing (with add-ons) |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Statistic gathering tools |
Yes |
Yes |
|
MVP acknowledgement |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Customizable presentation of folders |
No |
Yes |
|
Statistic of top posters automatic |
No |
Yes |
|
Passport authentication (user id, user management, spam control) |
No |
Yes |
|
Allow for easier integration with client-based help systems (MSDN Forums queried through VS 2005 Help) |
No |
Yes |
|
Popular and growing user base? (see attached study) |
No |
Yes |
Customers continually tell us the single most important community feature is finding quick, accurate answers to technical questions—using online communities as free tech support. Web forums allow for the creation of an online community that delivers this community-based tech support in a much more efficient and accessible way than what was possible before using NNTP-based newsgroups. The new MSDN Forums have already been a huge success for early adopters of Visual Studio.NET 2005.
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About Jim Glass
As the Microsoft Dynamics CRM UX site manager, I am a passionate advocate for our customers, especially in the areas of CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, small business, and business web sites.
After twenty years in the U.S. Army Engineer Corps, I started at Microsoft as a contractor on the newly formed NT DDK team in 92. I then moved to the Trolls, a production team for the Windows SDK and DDK teams. I lead the WBEM team which became the WMI SDK team. My last seven years has been spent as the Visual Studio SDK doc. manager.
In my spare time I can be found tutoring my grandkids, playing the saxophone (soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone), playing summer-league basketball, and moderating the Sax On The Web forum.
