Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Online Communities

Date 5/4/2010

Starting in early summer 2010, Microsoft will begin progressively closing
down the Microsoft public newsgroups to enrich conversations in the
rapidly-growing forum platform. This decision is in response to worldwide
market trends and evolving customer needs.



Microsoft continues to invest in forums to reduce customer effort,
consolidate community venues and make it easier for active contributors to
retain their influence. Forums provide a healthy community environment with
less spam and make answers easier to find by customers and search engines.
Additionally, forums offer a better user and off-topic management platform
that will improve customer satisfaction by facilitating discussions in a
clean space.



We understand that some newsgroups are still active, and important to the
community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be rolling out tools and
resources to minimize disruption to the community discussions.



We are working diligently on providing additional resources and information
in local languages later this week. In the meantime, please refer to the
official Microsoft Newsgroup website
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...s/default.mspx concerning this
issue. The Microsoft Newsgroup website will be made available in additional
languages in the next few days.