Dynamics 365 Community Update

Welcome to the inaugural Community Platform Update. As part of our commitment to transparency, we are publishing a weekly announcement to share the status of the Microsoft community platforms. The purpose of this is to keep you appraised of our ongoing efforts to enhance the community sites, improve the user experience, and to give you a roadmap of features that we are rolling out in response to your feedback.

Summary

This week, we were able to deliver key improvements addressing spam, optimizing performance, and improving the user experience.

Spam

While for obvious reasons we must limit how much detail we can provide about our tactics and techniques, what we can share is that due to a combination of strategies, we’ve removed or blocked over 68,000 spam posts and 440,000 spam comments over the past seven days. Spam remains a challenge, however, and we plan to roll out additional solutions in the coming weeks which we believe will continue to combat the problem.

In the meantime, we have taken some temporary steps to limit the disruptive impact of spam. We’ve throttled notifications to prevent it from being used as a spam mechanism. And we’ve introduced some moderation techniques for new accounts. We understand that this may have an unwanted impact on the user experience, so this will not last longer than necessary as we roll out additional solutions.

Performance

We have identified multiple areas where we were able to improve performance. Over the past week, we’ve made the following progress:

• Thread landing Page: The P90th response time has improved by 11.5%, reducing from 9.6 seconds to 8.5 seconds.
• Forums landing page: The P90th response time has marginally improved by 6.3%, reducing from 7.9 seconds to 7.4 seconds.

We are at or ahead of schedule to hit our milestones of a sub-5 second load times by the end of September, and we’ve identified several opportunities to hit that number.

User Experience

One of the most requested features from the community is the ability to send Private Messages to each other. Beginning the week of 9/3, this feature will be made available to community users. Once rolled out, we will make progressive enhancements to the feature, beginning with messaging the community managers group, and eventually enhancements to the content of the messages themselves (e.g. support for rich text).

In addition, in consultation with members of the community, we have planned the following features for rollout between now and the end of September 2024:

• Notifications: Implementing notifications for forum, thread subscriptions and replies.
• Sorting Options: Expanding sorting options for posts and replies.
• Sticky Banner Notifications: Introducing banner notifications for public announcements.
• Blog Image uploads enhancements: Improvements to the thumbnail upload process for the Blogs.

We will have a more complete roadmap that will cover our plans through April 2025 ready for review by the Power Platform Conference.

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