Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 11 May 2022

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Office Add-ins community ideas

Description

Door #1, #2, #3? In this 12-minute Developer-focused demo, Linda Cannon delivers a candid update on the quest to settle on the correct and final home for your Office Add-ins related suggestions and ideas. What is the current state, our shared objectives, our technical challenges, and pros/cons for potential next steps? Please chime in and let us know what you think we should do on this front. As well, regarding ideas for Add-ins samples, share your opinion in a call on June 15th, 8:00 am PT. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Office Add-ins community call – May 2022, recorded on May 11, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Linda Cannon - Senior Content Product Manager (Microsoft) | @lindalu_MSFT

Supporting documents
• Suggestions - Microsoft 365 Developer Platform Ideas - Office Add-ins | aka.ms/m365dev-suggestions
• Issues - OfficeDev/office-js/issues | https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js/issues
• Forum - Microsoft Ideas forum - Feedback Portal | https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback
• June 15th call – https://aka.ms/officeaddinsamnples-call

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365/community

A

Hi everybody, my name's linda cannon and I'm a senior content project manager in the developer platform engagement group, so my team is responsible for things like the microsoft 365 developer program and all of our dev center sites, like developer.microsoft.com, microsoft, 365 that sort of thing, and I work with juan and david and abeed anyway. I understand that some of our community members are concerned about our responsiveness to your ideas for our platform and I'm here to tell you that. Yes, we are very much aware of the situation.

A

I wanted to give you a little bit of backstory for people who didn't know why we moved away from user voice that happened last year. Sadly, they they meaning the powers that be at microsoft, kind of pulled the plug on us and surprised us and left us, without uh with a very very few days to migrate the ideas that we did have on uservoice to a new platform.

A

The reason why they closed down uservoice is because microsoft is committed to privacy and compliance for our customers. Data and uservoice was not complying with that. So they were, they were not keeping your personal information. Private, and so we, uh it was a legal reason, even though, on this support page that I'm showing you kind of, has a blase answer. Why microsoft is moving away a couple. People ask well what happened to the feedback we did provide.

A

Our team was basically focusing on any suggestion that had over a hundred votes, there was a whole bunch of data on uservoice and we did not save all of it, but we did migrate.

A

Every suggestion for office, developer platform or sharepoint developer platform graph and teams over to a new site and what we did was we created and because the new developer, the new feedback community, wasn't ready. Yet we kind of on the fly created this place on the tech community and we created what we're calling the microsoft 365 developer platform ideas forum, where you can submit ideas and we have about 627 at the moment now.

A

A couple of you have pointed out: well hey: what's the point of doing that because there's 621 new and it doesn't look like anybody's paying any attention- and I hear that and I tend to agree- I don't think we did a very good job on user voice either.

A

So we need to figure out how we can follow up and hear you and you felt heard I think, that's the main problem, another problem we have with this platform by the way I'm trying to be as transparent as I can just so you guys know what our current situation is. So for the benefit of honesty, I'm just going to keep at that. So what we have here is the new developer platform.

A

You can see I can sort by most upvotes and if I, if I choose a label office, add-ins development, for example, we have uh we have fewer um and you can see that out of all the ideas shown here, there's the top upvote is 27.

A

now, given that user voice was gigantic and this little corner of the world is much smaller. Clearly, we're not going to have as many people seeing this as many to be able to upvote these ideas, so therein lies another problem. Is we need to figure out? What is a good vote cut off to start paying attention?

A

Another thing we have a problem with: is the developers and the program managers getting their eyes on it? One of the things we do successfully very successfully is we have a feedback coordinator? It rotates through our team of about 30 pms.

A

Everybody has a week about twice a year and they go to our office js site, which I'm sure all of you know about and anything that bought will triage a new idea so every day, somebody's looking at all these new issues and assigning them out, so I'm skipping ahead. You might be able to figure out where I'm going with this, but I wanted to share a couple other things with you, so we migrated off of uservoice for our ideas and suggestions onto this interim developer platform, and now microsoft has rolled out their corporate wide feedback.

A

This was just released back in october and they've created all these sub forums. um For teams for all the microsoft products, uh the link is in the slide, so you can have a look at this new thing, even though we have products listed here. This is all product centric and they only like just recently, I'm clicking on outlook added a category for developers.

A

So the reason why we have withheld migrating to this yet a third place for ideas and whatnot is because we didn't have a developer category and them adding. This is a result of me, literally nagging them to death, so we now have some place where you can check and say: okay, I have a developer idea this. This particular microsoft feedback forum has a lot more traffic than what we're currently using.

A

So one of our options is to take everything here and migrate, migrated over there and start from there, but there and still lies the problem. Well, that's great sending customers to yet a third place. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to get eyes on this engineering eyes pmiss, so my suggestion would be to my team is to add to our weekly feedback process coordinator.

A

That person would go over to one of these feedback forms, whichever we decide and triage those ideas as well. That way, we don't have I'm flipping tabs again 621 new untriaged ideas. People would at least know what you know if we're working on it, and we could, you know cross-reference if it's in the backlog, all that kind of stuff, so that this is the new feedback forum from microsoft. It does have all of the office products in here and each one of them does have a developer tool category.

A

So you know it's possible to use this up until recently, I felt it wasn't very easy to use because it didn't have developer tools. So if you're a product, for example like sharepoint with 4000 feedback, how do you know you know what the developer ideas are, but now we can filter on that. So that does make this much more usable, although we haven't migrated to it yet. So, let's see, we've talked about what the current state is.

A

We've talked about what some of the problems are and we've talked about what these areas are, where we can have feedback currently we're here. We've got this new community, but we also have our our github repo and we do have a label uh that has let's see this is getting slow. One of the one of our labels is a type. Let's see, let's see if I can go to the next page here, product feature request.

A

What we do here is we say: hey, that's a great product feature request, go to one of these forums and submit your idea and then get everybody to upload it.

A

So I don't know if it's possible or not, because github does not have an upvote per se, although it does have a thumbs up- and I know that somebody's written a plugin that if you say plus one in the comments, it will count all those. So we would be able to know you know the popular ideas, but the benefit of this site is that it does have people looking at it internally. It does have the engineers it does. Have the pms perusing all these issues in github.

A

So now you know kind of where we're at and the the things that we are uh discussing internally. I don't think I've left anything out. We are trying to decide and we really really do value what you think about this situation.

A

So again, we currently have this interim place. That is not getting a lot of eyes and not getting a lot of processing.

A

We do have the new community that now has a developer area for all of our areas, and then we also have github with the potential to move issues and ideas there, because we do have the tab. We do have problems to solve. If you have any ideas, such as how we should regulate or count votes how we can get more eyes how we can be more responsive, what it is you need from us david and my colleague elizabeth.

A

I don't know if she's on this call, but the three of us are really paying attention to this process and trying to figure out what is the best for you. So I've shared everything that I can think of david did. I leave anything out.

B

No, I don't think so. Did you want any feedback from folks if they would.

A

Love it yeah yeah. Maybe it's just a chat or I don't know if we have time for questions right now, but we're.

B

Already, mostly on time, yeah.

A

Okay, yeah: let's have people put things in the chat and I'll review it with you and we can figure out where to go from here. Hopefully we'll have this ironed out for you folks by next month. That's knock on wood.

B

Yeah, I thanks linda. I think you know it's it's. uh I know this is a really important space for folks and I'm often I think, with three or four q and a's per call like say: hey, that's a great idea: can you can you put it in the idea site? So you know I. I also want to be sure these things are getting attention. I'd also be kind of curious to hear from folks, like I think there are github repos out there that do track ideas like this and have some sort of voting system.

B

So if anybody has experience with that or has participated in it and you have thoughts on that, it'd be curious. We'd be curious to hear from you as well.

A

Thanks, everyone have a great rest of your week, thanks.

B

Linda all right, so I tacked on one slide to the interior, which is kind of related to community.

B

So um I've set up a meeting on june 15th teams meeting, which is the wednesday after the next to call community call, which is on june 8th, so we're looking for feedback from folks on samples specifically, and so this will be kind of a deep dive with folks to just chat about samples and see what you need. We can see the traffic to the repo for samples and it was about 5 000 folks, a month roughly that are going and looking at the samples.

B

But you know we can't tell our folks being satisfied with what they see are. Is the sample code copyable into your own projects and helping you know, do we have gaps that we need to look at? Are there challenging parts of the of the development experience that you know? Maybe samples could help in some space. I mean there's a lot. We don't know, and so it would be great to hear from folks from all you developers.

B

You know what would you like to see in the samples over the next six months to year, in terms of where you think we should go with it? So there's a link there, uh the aka dot, ms slash office, add and samples dash call. So that will take you to the team meeting. Of course it doesn't start until june. 15Th at 8 am pacific time. So please join us. If you can.