Web Portal Manages Customer Feedback

The Microsoft Connect Web portal is becoming the main avenue for customer participation in Microsoft’s beta programs. Through the Connect portal, a customer can find and apply to beta programs and, if accepted, download the software along with product keys, release notes, and white papers. Most important, Connect lets customers provide and review feedback, including bug reports. Although a large and growing number of products use Connect, some key product teams such as Office still do not fully participate, and the feedback section could benefit from allowing more advanced searches on the feedback that a participant has submitted.

Microsoft Connect

In the past, many Microsoft product teams developed their own ways of managing customer preview or beta programs. For example, products such as Windows used the WindowsBeta site, and others, such as Office, used the Beta Place site. These sites allowed customers to access the latest builds and provide some limited feedback, but typically, because of the large number of participants, there was no way to communicate with the product team other than submitting a bug. As a result, customers often had no idea whether the product team even received the bug, let alone how they had prioritized it or whether they were able to reproduce it.