Microsoft has Shutdown Several UserVoice Feedback Forums

[mood]

Microsoft has Shutdown Several UserVoice Feedback Forums

 

Microsoft appears to have made a move that will likely leave many confused as the company appears to have shut down some of their popular feedback forums, UserVoice. For those not familiar, UserVoice is where Microsoft was collecting feedback about features, updates, bugs, and other items related to a wide variety of services but that appears to be coming to an end.

 

The company was using UserVoice for many different products but earlier today friends on Twitter started noticing that they could no longer access the forums for some products like Office 365. Further, not only are they no longer online but all the data that was contained within the feedback tools is also no longer accessible.

 

As of the time of this post, it looks like Office 365 is completely gone but the company is still directing users to that site. Their support documentation currently states:

UserVoice is the official suggestion box for Microsoft Office. Click the link for the product you wish to leave feedback for below, then search to see if somebody else has already offered that feedback. If they have you can add your own comments and vote for their suggestion. Votes are a great way for users to indicate how important a particular idea or suggestion is to them.

But if you follow the links it can lead you to a dead end as shown in the image below.

 

I have reached out to Microsoft for comment about the shutdown and what they recommend going forward for customers to provide feedback.

 

Microsoft header image of the now-closed UserVoice forum for Office 365 where they no longer want your feedback.

 

This is a big shift for Microsoft and my gut would say that the company is looking to move to internal tools and that’s a perfectly reasonable approach. But what is not reasonable is not letting the entire Microsoft community know that these forums were going away until it was impossible to access the service with no officially documented workaround.

 

From my perspective, the bigger loss here is the data that was contained in these forums now appears to be lost. I would frequently track these items as a way to understand feature and product sentiment but without User Voice, that data is now harder to isolate.

 

Of course, this all could be an accident but given that I am hearing from many different insiders that this appears to be intentional, it looks like UserVoice is going the way of the Zune.

 

 

Source: Microsoft has Shutdown Several UserVoice Feedback Forums