What you need to know
- Microsoft confirmed that it has moved on from UserVoice for Office 365.
- The company will move away from UserVoice for several products throughout this year.
- Microsoft will instead use first-party solutions for feedback.
Last week, Petri reported on the fact that the UserVoice forums for Office 365 were no longer online. We reached out to Microsoft to confirm if the forums were actually gone or if an error had occurred.
A Microsoft spokesperson responded to us, stating:
We are always striving to better serve our customers, including how we can improve the tools and processes for collecting feedback. We are leveraging 1st party solutions and are evaluating enhancements and standardizations to improve and streamline how we communicate with customers and collect their feedback.
A Microsoft support page sheds more light on the move away from UserVoice. It states:
Note: We will be moving away from UserVoice feedback sites on a product-by-product basis throughout the 2021 calendar year. We will leverage 1st party solutions for customer feedback.
Echoing the statement from the Microsoft spokesperson, the support page states that Microsoft is moving to first-party solutions. The statements leave a little wiggle room for Microsoft to continue to use UserVoice for some products, but it appears that the company is moving on from UserVoice altogether.
Moving to first-party solutions for feedback isn't a surprising move. Microsoft has the ability to receive and respond to feedback without using a third-party. But as Petri's Brad Sams notes, Microsoft cutting access to forums without notice could be frustrating for some. Many people use the forums to gauge people's opinions, but that data seems to no longer be accessible.
