[INFO] Desconexión de los Grupos de Noticias Públicos de Microso ft

The purpose of this communication is to inform you of our plan to strengthen
our technical community and provide a long-term community value to our users,
via the migration of Microsoft NNTP public newsgroups to web-based Microsoft
community forums. This forums plan has been in development and now it
reached a phase where is worthy of your attention.

As a result of our continuous investment in community and the rise of social
media, growth in our forums has been consistently increasing since its
launch, as we are serving today more than 15M customer visits per month with
an average growth of 12% month-over-month. Community participation in
newsgroups has declined by 48% during this time, and trending looks to
reflect this decline month-over-month.

Microsoft’s goal is to unify on one approach so that all community users can
receive maximum value from the knowledge created by community leaders such as
yourself. This move will also eliminate the existing fragmented and
disconnected experience resulting from the multiple platforms that are
offered today. Users will also benefit from the personalization and
discoverability of solutions that we can enable in the forums environment.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has invested in web-based forums
technology to offer a richer and up-to-date online experience to our
community which is fully-aligned with market trends. This facilitates the
addressing of scenarios around discussions and Q&A as well as providing
better integration with our product web properties.

The existing newsgroup platform (NNTP) is running on an outdated version of
Microsoft Exchange that has reached its end-of-life and is no longer
supported due to a business decision taken by Microsoft many years ago. This
makes it impossible to enhance basic functionality, keep the platform secure
and deliver a healthy experience for you and our communities.

Beginning in May 2010, Microsoft will begin announcing the progressive
discontinuance of public newsgroups and start inviting users to use the
Microsoft forums that include Microsoft Answers, TechNet and MSDN. This move
will add substantial benefits for the whole community such as: centralized
searchable content, the improved ability for top contributors (like yourself)
to retain their influence, the reduction of redundancies, making content
easier to find, better indexing and advanced moderation capabilities
(including offline accessibility). Overall, forums offer a better spam and
user management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by ensuring
a healthy discussion space and minimizing the effect of spam, trolls,
off-topic messages, synchronization, etc.



Saludos,
Enrique Cortés
Microsoft MVP - Windows Internet Explorer
ekormu@mvps.org
www.ekort.blogspot.com

Windows 7 RTM
Windows XP Profesional SP3
Internet Explorer 8