Microsoft appears to have shut down its Office 365 UserVoice forums, which allowed users to share feedback about the productivity apps with the company. As of today, the main Office 365 UserVoice website greets visitors with a message saying that “This site is not currently active,” though as of this writing the rest of the UserVoice websites for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and other Microsoft services are still online with no visible changes.
We couldn’t find an official announcement for the sunsetting of the Office 365 UserVoice forums, but we’ve reached out to Microsoft to get a comment on this decision. Brad Sams, who reported on the news on Petri.com earlier today suggested that the software giant could be looking to transition this crowdsourcing effort to in-house tools, and that would indeed make sense. UserVoice is a platform that allows users to suggest ideas, comment and vote for them, and Microsoft doesn’t really have a similar interactive platform for communities as of today.
Tony Redmond, a longtime Microsoft MVP also revealed in a blog post yesterday that the UserVoice forum for the Microsoft Information product group was also shutting down, with the team explaining on Yammer that this was the result of “recent policy updates within Microsoft across all products.” Redmond went further and claimed that “the move to dump User Voice is a Microsoft corporate edict that affects all development groups.” According to his own sources, Microsoft’s decision could also be GDPR-related.
Unfortunately, all content posted on the Office 365 UserVoice forums has now disappeared, and it’s unfortunate that Microsoft didn’t warn users beforehand and found a solution to transfer this valuable crowdsource data somewhere else. We’ll update this post if we hear anything back from Microsoft, let us know in the comments if you’ve been using a regular user of the Office 365 and other Microsoft UserVoice forums.
