There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc. and we need to make our voice heard. This can be done in several ways, we can talk to our Microsoft representatives, we can whine on our blogs and on social networks OR we could make ourselves heard at UserVoice.
Microsoft and different divisions and groups within Microsoft has started to use UserVoice pretty extensively lately. UserVoice is a great service where you can set up your own channel, listen for feedback and questions, and answer them and most importantly act upon them. Just recently the SharePoint team had a blog post called “UserVoice driving improvements to SharePoint API” which shows just this. From the feedback they received on UserVoice and with direct and indirect customer contact they’ve made some pretty significant improvements to the SharePoint API’s, such as JSON Light support and others. I really dig this!
So, if you have a suggestion or improvement to Office, SharePoint and/or the Office 365 service then get your sorry behind over to UserVoice and make yourself heard. Read other peoples suggestions and vote on them. The more votes, the more likely the teams will pick up it.
Here are some of the UserVoice channels that Microsoft and the different product groups use:
- Office Developer Platform - http://officespdev.uservoice.com/
- OneNote - http://onenote.uservoice.com/
- Office Forms vNext - http://officeforms.uservoice.com/
- Visual Studio - http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/
- Windows Phone - http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/
- Microsoft Azure - http://feedback.azure.com/
One suggestion that I made the other day was a suggestion that the Office/SharePoint/Office 365 team has a publically posted “change log”. I would like them to post any changes done to the API, UI, CSS, JavaScript, PowerShell etc in a chronological change log, so we don’t have to read between the lines in KB articles etc. If you think that this is a great idea, then I invite you to vote on my suggestion here: http://officespdev.uservoice.com/forums/224641-general/suggestions/6297224-sharepoint-and-sharepoint-online-change-log