At TechEd Las Vegas we crossed 1 million threads in forums and a few weeks earlier 4 million messages. We did not celebrate these great numbers as the emphasis has shifted from from quantity to quality.
But different than going after quantity = critical mass = easy to measure - focusing on quality seems to be more of an ongoing & endless effort, with many small steps & improvements. This requires your involvement & feedback and us, reaching out to you on a regular base.
I'll kick this 'scrum project' off with this post and we will use all the SCN channels to keep you up2date and to get your input.
UI improvements
We have added the name of the forum as well as the number of messages in a thread to the searchresult. This will help make you more familiar with the mapping of products or even components with the forum's structure and might give you a better sense of the quality of this thread ( more messages = higher quality ??)
As a next step we will improve the UI of the forum's homepage, as I described in my last blog post. Please participate in this poll, as we currently have a clear trend but only from 36 votes.
We do need your input as behaviour might differ from beginners to experts and is dependant on browser(settings). As we do not know & understand 'how you navigate thru the forums' in detail, we are asking you to vote your preference.
Consolidate forums and Delete threads
During the summer we limited the number of 'open' threads to 10 and announced further steps to improve the quality in forums. We are now ready to talk about timelines and details.
We will run Community Projects to consolidate forum by forum plus enable you to delete those threads, you started and consider unvaluable. This will be started after TechEd Berlin in late October with the individual clean-up over all forums. Parallel we will run some pilots for the joint efforts. This all will be completed with joint Community Projects over all forums in November / December.
I'm personally dreaming of getting rid of 30% of the threads and in parallel doubling the quality and findability.
Let us know your input.
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