Dynamics 365 Community Platform update – Oct 28

Welcome to the next edition of the Community Platform Update. This is a status update of the latest capabilities and improvements our team is making to the community platforms. Each edition will provide a summary of the progress we’ve made over the past weeks, and what you can expect in the coming weeks.

Summary

Over the last two weeks, we have observed steady progress across key focus areas. Spam posts decreased by 40%, bringing weekly spam counts down to 652. Performance remained stable overall, though there was a slight 6% regression in the combined performance of Thread and Forum pages due to a bug, which is being addressed. We’ve also made significant progress on some of the top feature requests from Super Users, including user mentions, response templates, post filtering, and leaderboard improvements. 

Spam

Current Status: Weekly spam posts have decreased by 40%, from 1,090 to 652, with daily spam counts remaining in the low double digits—a 99.96% reduction from peak spam levels. 

Plan for next sprint:
Spam Countermeasures: Continue enhancing spam countermeasures to increase resilience against evolving spam tactics.

Performance

Current Status:  
Thread Landing Page: P90th response time regressed by 16%, increasing from 3.1 seconds to 3.6 seconds. 
Forums Landing Page: P90th response time regressed by 11.5%, increasing from 2.6 seconds to 2.9 seconds.  

User experience improvements

Progress made last sprint:  

• Super user asks: 
  • @mentions/user tagging: We are in the midst of testing approaches to implement a @mention/user tagging function on the board, which is one of the most requested features. We are exploring multiple options in POC environments and will determine which approach will ultimately provide the best experience for the community. 
  • Reply templates/Macros: We’ve finalized a design for personalized response templates, which is another of the most requested features by Super Users. 
  • Leaderboard: In addition to planned performance optimizations, users will soon be able to filter the leaderboard by timeframes (e.g., 24 hours, week, month).
  • User groups and Events membership: We’ve redesigned the User Groups page to make it easier to find group and event memberships. 
     
• Usability improvements: 
  • Dynamics 365 forum consolidation: We’ve completed the pre-production testing for forum consolidation, and we’ve documented plans for a rollout to production: https://aka.ms/d365structurechanges 
  • New Sort-by option: Members can now sort forum threads by “Most recent posts with no replies” which helps members get and give faster responses. 
  • External link behavior: We have implemented a change to force external links to open in a new tab, ensuring users are not navigated away from the community site.
  • Blog author feature flag: Blog authors can now mark a post as ‘featured’, so it will appear prominently on the blog landing page. 
  • Email communications: We’ve begun implementing a new email communications system that will allow us to more easily mass communicate with the entire user community. Currently, we are limited to PMs, and PMs have a set limit for the number of users we can message at once. This will help us send updates via email. 
  • Community events: Community events are now enabled on the Power Platform community.

Plan for next sprint: 

• @mentions/user tagging: We plan to continue working on the POC for @mentions and user tagging.  
• Reply templates/Macros: We are finalizing engineering designs for reply templates/macros and will next initiate a POC.  
• Leaderboard: We will implement date filters on the leaderboard to allow users to view leaders over the last 24 hours, week, or month. 

Community engagement

With us rapidly approaching stabilization of performance and feature parity, we have started to cast an eye to future iterations of the community sites. We have started to float ideas such as rethinking how the leaderboards work and have solicited feedback from the community. We’ve also started discussing what users would like to see in a virtual community lounge and incorporated their feedback as well. The longer-term idea is to make the community sites a centralized place for the communities to come together, share knowledge, best practices, ideas and build relationships outside the confines of problems and solutions. We plan to start building workstreams with the user groups in the coming months to assemble a plan. 

We encourage you to continue to make use of the feedback tool on the community to submit new ideas for enhancements and change requests. We continuously evaluate and triage your suggestions for placement on your roadmap, so please keep ‘em coming! This tool is the best way to ensure that your voice is heard.
 

Until next time,

Charles Drayton and the Community Engagement Team