Dynamics 365 Community Platform Update – Sep 9th

Welcome to the next edition of the Community Platform Update. This is a weekly status update of the latest capabilities and improvements our team is making to the community platforms. Each edition will provide a summary of the progress we’ve made over the past week, and what you can expect this week.

Summary

Last week, we made significant progress across our key focus areas, particularly in Spam Prevention, where our first batch of anti-spam techniques led to a 97.5% reduction in spam. Additionally, we continued to enhance our user experience and optimize performance, further strengthening the platform.

Spam

The introduction of pre-moderation for posts from new users has reduced spam by 97.5%, from 381k to 9.5k spam posts over a similar 4-day period. This is not the end of our efforts, however. We will continue to shift techniques and strategies and introduce new solutions as we work to create the optimal balance between a welcoming and engaging user experience and a secure, spam-free environment. So far, the results have been encouraging, but we want to hear from you as well with your feedback.

Performance

Our performance numbers are continuously improving in the two commonly used pages where users are experiencing slow performance:

• Thread landing Page: The P90th response time improved by 3%, reducing from 7.9 seconds to 7.6 seconds.
• Forums landing page: The P90th response time improved 21%, reducing from 7.2 seconds to 5.7 seconds.

We’ve identified several new areas where redesigning the user experience would result in improved load times and performance. In particular, we intend to work on the following improvements over the next week:

• Redesigning thread landing page: Redesigning the thread landing page as well as the underlying query. We believe this will improve navigability for users and significantly decrease load times.
• Modern Thread List Control: We have started some testing on a new type of control on the forum thread based on the PowerApps Control Framework (PCF). Preliminary testing suggests a 3x improvement in speed, which is extremely encouraging. We will have more to say about this in the next edition when we’ve made more progress with our proof of concept.

User Experience

Progress Made Last Week:

• Private messaging: We have enabled the Private Messaging feature for the Community members. This will allow you to message the Community Managers. We will enable more features for Private Messaging in future milestones over the coming weeks and months.
• Persistent banner notifications: We implemented and tested the perisitent banner notification changes last week. This will allow us to have a banner with updates and communication that a user will be able to see no matter what their landing point.
• Landing page unification: Based on feedback from community members who use both the Dynamics and the Power Platform communities, we’ve created an alternative unified Power Platform and Dynamics 365 landing page. It includes unified authentication, and links to some new Microsoft resources that we believe will further support the community. Note that this does not affect the existing landing pages, but simply provides a unified portal to both. We’ve completed and tested these pages last week.
• Sorting Options: We finalized our design on the defaulting sorting option for the Forum landing page and improved on the sorting definition to align with the end-user expectations.
• Prioritized backlog for Milestone 2:Based on feedback from community managers, ambassadors, MVPs, and others, we have finalized the feature list for Milestone 2 (end of September) and made progress on top priorities.

Plan for This Week:

• Persistent banner notifications: We have deployed this to production today.
• Sorting Options: Improved sorting options on the Forum landing page were developed and tested last week and will be deployed this week, perhaps even by the time you read this. We will be working on the design for the Thread sorting options based on the feedback shared by MVP/Super User community.
• Subscriptions/Notifications: As the Spam counts are reduced by 97.5%, we will be re-enabling the Forum subscriptions notifications later this week. We will also introduce an auto-subscribe feature for the commenter on a post.
• Prioritized backlog for Milestone 3: We are continuing to work through reviewing the prioritized backlog of community enhancements and share a list of top items for Milestone 3 (end of October). We will unveil these priorities at the Power Platform Conference and further discuss them at the next Ambassador call.

We encourage you to continue to make use of the feedback tool on the community to submit new ideas for enhancements and change requests. We continuously evaluate and triage your suggestions for placement on your roadmap, so please keep ‘em coming! This tool is the best way to ensure that your voice is heard.

If you’re a Community Ambassador, we also encourage you to attend our monthly Ambassador calls where you will have an opportunity to provide feedback directly to the platform team and discuss our plans with us. And if you’re coming to the Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas, please stop by the Community Lounge and meet with us. We will be there to say hello and listen to your thoughts and feedback.

Until next week,

Charles Drayton and the Community Engagement Team