Hello everybody and welcome to the new location for your community; we hope you find that the features and characteristics of this new site are much better suited to facilitate the interaction with your peers as well as surfacing and highlighting valuable resources (created by you, Microsoft, others or a combination of all of the above). Allow me to call your attention to a few aspects of this new community site:
Discussions
The discussion spaces we have created should look really familiar to anyone that participated in the old community site; we have grouped them by what we believe are key ‘intentions’ or ‘objectives’ you may be trying to achieve using Microsoft Office Live Small Business and we hope this will make it easier to have the right discussions in the right places. We expect this to be a site that evolves based on your needs; what other discussion spaces do we need? What other ‘Groups’?
Post Ratings (Stars)
Do you like the answer one of your peers provided? Or maybe you don’t? Use the stars at the top of the posts (below the subject line) to express your opinion (More stars = Higher Score). These star ratings will be used to select Community Members to be displayed at these aggregation pages (which work as filters): Get Online, Attract Customers, and Manage your Business.
Blog
We have migrated our Blog location so now it is integrated in this site; we expect this to considerably improve the discovery of valuable information at the blog as well as improve the attention and follow up to the comments you choose to make on those posts.
Tags
You will notice that the home page displays a number of “words/phrases” on the bar at the right; these basically come from the “Tags” (or labels) you choose to apply to the discussion posts you create: when creating a post look below the ‘Message’ box and you will see a smaller box for the Tags, you can apply as many tags as you want (coma separated). We encourage you to use this feature as it will facilitate discovery of valuable resources for you and others.
There are many other aspects of this site that we will be highlighting in upcoming posts; let’s keep this one at this for now.
See you online!
Filiberto Selvas