Hi Kerry,
Corentin, this is sort of an aside but has no one ever thought it
awfully odd Microsoft uses google groups to support its Mac software.
Well they don't. They use a publicly available nntp server and Google
groups simply mirror these groups (as they do for most others public
nntp groups).
MS has nothing to do with this. It's an initiative from Google groups.
No other vendor of software I use does this.
They don't use nntp and that's a shame. It's a really convenient way to
get into the groups, track replies, etc.
They all have their own
dedicated forums and their really generally quite impressive in the
way they operate. I suspect actually a lot of them are purchased from
a vendor that builds the stuff as they all seem to work quite
similarly except for Apple and Apple's support forum is probably the
best on the web.
MS wanted to go the same way (and they did for some groups).
For the Mac groups, it was strongly locked into nntp so they had to
mirror the groups on MacTopia with their own interface.
I wish they had chosen a different contractor to mirror the groups as
the experience is really suboptimal. In this respect, Google Groups does
it tremendously better.
I suspect that MS would love to move the whole thing to their own
web-based servers, but they know they would lose most MVPs and old-time
users of the nntp groups. In addition, since nntp groups are mirrored on
multiple servers, they simply can't kill them. The groups would still
live their own life out there...
I find it amazing Microsoft provides such poor support to the Mac user
community and a company with their money - like how cheap can you get.
Well that's because you assumed MS made a deal with Google for mirroring
the groups, but it's not the case.
The MS-hosted forums (mirroring the same groups) are here:
http://www.officeformac.com/productforums/
(and they are currently down for maintenance and *hopefully*
improvements).
There's nothing wrong with these google groups but it doesn't provide
the kind of feedback that you get from these dedicated support forums
like the number of people that have viewed the item, # of answers, all
your questions, outstanding unanswered questions etc.
True. nntp though has it's advantages, like supporting offline reading,
etc.
With a decent nntp client, you can get a lot of fairly nice features
(filtering, tagging, graphical representation of the threads,
auto-taging of answers in threads you participated in, etc). Plus it's a
one-stop location if you also participate in other nntp groups (as I do
- there are numerous Mac groups out there).
They'd do themselves a favour in terms of tel support too but maybe
they want people to phone in at the ridiculous price they charge for
tel support. Others do this too but its not that necessary as
generally I find all answers I need from the forum and if not a KB and
then there is generally there is the option to write free of charge.
I could not agree more. They have plenty of room for improvement (and
paid-phone support is a pain, and an outrage in other countries where
it's even more expensive than in the US).
Corentin (posting using MacSOUP over the msnew.microsoft.com
public nntp server)
