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Forums vs. Newsgroups

  • Статья

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.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2006
    My biggest complaint about Forums is that browsing any forum is inferior to browsing a newsgroup.

    You're often limited to very few rows per screen , forcing endless paging.  

    And then the interface between message detail view and message list view discourages doing many context switches.


    It's a disincentive to be there for anything other than a selfish reason as it's too tedius to explore other people's issue and possibly be able to help them or learn from them.

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2006
    Vince, you have interesting insights. Can you confirm whether these observations are true for http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn?

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2006
    I’ve been saying this for years, but take a look at this:
    http://blogs.msdn.com/jim_glass/archive/2006/05/15/597999.aspx...

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2006
    CrmBlog:

    The MS Forums aren't so bad. I wish there was a way to increase the number of items per page though.

    your question did make me think more about what I said.  and comparing how the forums are vs. what i complained about, there really aren't that many things with the forums, so I think a lot of attitude comes from the mental tax that I perceive in using a web forum as opposed to newsgroup reader.  I think it's a bias that's present that a web forum will have a hard time overcoming without some effort on my part to allow it to change my impression.

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2007
    Hi There.   I'm the Community PM for BizTalk and HIS and we went through similar discussions within our team.  We've now rolled out forums which our MVPs and PGs are supporting quiet well.  The challenge is coming from the shift of resources from newsgroups to forums.  Our newsgroups are suffering at this time due to less PG & MVP interaction.  And as long as offline capability is not supported on forums, we're in a bind to support both channels. What's your perspective on the above mentioed issues?  Did the rollout of Forums impact your URM # on newsgroups?   I'd love to chat more with you about this. Marjan Kalantar

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    June 17, 2009
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