Anyone that follows my blog, you know my thoughts on what was once known as UserVoice; a great concept, horribly implemented and not properly administered!

As I mentioned back in September in my post UserVoice For Access In Gone UserVoice was finally killed off by Microsoft. In my earlier post on the subject Bye Bye UserVoice! the question was “What will replace it, if anything?” Well, today, I have the answer!

Say hello to the Microsoft Feedback Portal, UserVoice’s successor.

The Excel team published a post on the subject yesterday: Announcing the new Microsoft Feedback portal – accepting suggestions now!. Sadly, no mention of it in the Access blog. 🙁

The Excel team describes the portal as:

… where you can submit suggestions about … Microsoft products, vote and comment on suggestions made by others, and see feedback you’ve submitted.

So the exact same idea as UserVoice at the end of the day.

Below are a few links to common applications feedback portal

You must sign-in to contribute in any way.

The new feedback form looks like

I’m disappointed to see the web version still limits how much you can enter in the description and is simply too small in many instances to properly describe issues, give enough detail to reproduce issues, … So Microsoft wants your feedback, just not all of it! 🙂 The same is true of the built-in feedback options in Microsoft Applications and Windows. What I always advise users in forums is to explain things as best you can (summarize), but be sure to include you email address and you can create an online folder (OneDrive, Google Drive, DropBox, …) and place relevant information (images, document with repro steps, demo file (database, workbook, …), screen capture video illustrating the issue, … and then simply include the link to the folder in your feedback. So despite Microsoft’s inability to give us the means to provide a complete information, there are ways to still do so!

It is also important to note that the Feedback Portal is still in Preview and IMHO still needs a lot of work!!!

It is very frustrating to see that this new medium still is allowing totally garbage entries, such as: Nice. I would have though that eliminating SPAM entries would have been a top priority considering how plagues Uservoice was with it. Let us just hope then that they manage the content properly and delete such entries promptly.

This of course brings up so many questions:

• Why close UserVoice when the replacement wasn’t even operational
• Why publish the Feedback Portal when it is still in development
• Why weren’t the UserVoice suggestions carried over to the new Feedback Portal. Let us restart everything, again! 🙁

Ultimately, the real question is:

• Does it really make any difference what we contribute?
• Does Microsoft actually listen to anything we suggestion/post/contribute? On this front, I’m far from convinced as my statistical analysis of UserVoice over the years was very clear. Let us hope Feedback Portal does better (not very hard to accomplish!)!

What are your thoughts on this? Will you use this new tool? Are you going to re-enter suggestions you previously made on UserVoice? Is all of this an exercise in futility and nothing more than another Microsoft PR stunt? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think of it all!

There’s More On This Subject

Be Sure to check out my other articles on the subject: