For many years the Microsoft Dynamics GP Community Forum was one of the best places to get help and discuss all things relating to our wonderful Microsoft Dynamics GP / Great Plains product.

That was until 08-Nov-2024 when Microsoft, in its wisdom, consolidated the forums and combined the Microsoft Dynamics GP forum with the Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics SL and Microsoft Dynamics 365 forums into a single forum, the Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, AX, GP, SL Community Forum.

The result being that, for the next five weeks or so, the new forum became almost unusable for the Microsoft Dynamics GP community.

The forum enforces that at least one Category is selected for any question added and used the following category list:

• Finance
• Fraud Protection
• Human Resources
• Intelligent Order Managment
• Project Operations
• Project Service Automation
• Microsoft Dynamics AX
• Microsoft Dynamics GP
• Microsoft Dynamics SL

This category list is meant to reflect the Microsoft Dynamics products, but we saw the “Finance”, “Human Resources” and “Project Operations” being treated as areas within a product and being combined with Microsoft Dynamics GP, for example.

While the web interface for the forum did allow the forum to be filtered by the Category: Microsoft Dynamics GP, if you set up a subscription to the forum you would have been inundated with irrelevant posts relating to other products.

I tracked the subscription emails and in 5 weeks received 259 emails of which only 15 were related to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Meaning that 94% of emails received were “noise” from other products. This signal to noise ration meant that many users of the forum gave up and left the community.

Please Come Back Now

I have been working with Scott Dodds from Microsoft Community Forums team, and they have now resolved the issues with the consolidated forum and made it usable again for the Microsoft Dynamics GP Community.

The category list has been updated to ensure that users understand that the list only contains products and not “areas”. This was my suggestion that they implement 😊, so the category list is shown below and resolves the incorrect category selection issues.

• Dynamics 365 Finance
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources
• Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Managment
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations
• Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation
• Microsoft Dynamics AX
• Microsoft Dynamics GP
• Microsoft Dynamics SL

They have also implemented filtering of the email subscriptions so you can limit the categories that you receive email notifications for. This resolves the bad signal to noise ratio with subscriptions.

The new consolidated forum has also transferred all the threads from the old forum going back to 01-Oct-2019 (that’s over 530 pages of history).

With the searchable history, better Categories, the ability to filter both the Web user interface and the email subscription notifications, the Microsoft Community forum is usable again.

Please come back and help us build the community forum back to the amazingly useful tool it has previously been. As resources leave the GP community it is vital that we have a place to share knowledge and help others.

Links

• Microsoft Dynamics GP Community Forum (Archived)
• Microsoft Dynamics GP Community Forum (Unfiltered)
• Microsoft Dynamics GP Community Forum (Filtered to GP)
• ** PLEASE DON’T KILL OUR DYNAMICS GP FORUM ** Forum Thread

Thanks, Scott for putting up with my complaints and rants and working to get the suggestions for improvements implemented. The effort that you and the Forum development team have put in has turned the Forum back into a valuable resource for the Microsoft Dynamics GP community.

See everyone there.

David

This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.