The Microsoft Dynamics Community Team is excited to announce the February 2012 release, bringing a refined user experience, more useful content and navigation on home pages, and recommended content when reading blog articles and forum posts.  This is the first of several releases planned this year, all aimed at making the site easier to use and allowing you to get the help you need for your technical, developer, and end-user questions. 

What’s New

  • Updated User Experience – You’ll notice lots of changes throughout the site, including an improved layout, easier to read text, and generally more focus placed on content.
  • Home Pages – When you’re on the Community home page you’ll now see much more prominent links to individual community pages, with the ability to go directly to the forums or blogs for that community.  All recent information is now displayed in a single area, providing you with at-a-glance access to what’s new in the community.
  • Forums – We’ve removed the list of all forums to give more attention to questions posted, but you can still access the list via the new “Browse all Forums” button.  We’ve also added a “replies” column so you can see how many potential answers have been submitted to questions and included a search field directly in the list so you can quickly find answers to your question.  Community members who’ve signed-in can now track all your discussions and unread questions.
  • Blogs – Similar to forums, we’ve removed the list of individual blogs and made them available via a new “Browse All Blogs” button.  This new blogs page allows you to search for a specific blog or explore other blogs based on the number of blog articles and when the last blog article was posted.
  • Forum Posts and Blog Articles – When reading forum posts and blog articles you’ll now see other related forum posts and blog articles, allowing you to explore other potential answers to your question.  We’ve also added a tag cloud to the page, making it easy to see other content based on topic.  At the bottom of blog articles we’ve other top viewed articles from the current blog.


Feedback

While using these new features, drop us a note on the Community Feedback forum and let us know what you think or send us a Tweet at @MSDYNCOMM.  Also look for us at Convergence in the expo booths 83/84 within the Microsoft Experience Center.  We hope you enjoy the new features in this release!