How can I give feedback on Microsoft’s products? If I do, what happens then?

If you’ve worked with any MS product for a longer period, using its features and encountering its shortcomings, you may have thought about those two questions. The answers to either one is specific to the product in question. In this article I’ll share a few examples and observations from Microsoft’s feedback management process.

“Welcome to yet another ideas portal!”

Recently I noticed that Microsoft Fabric had launched a new site for Fabric Ideas. Upon closer inspection, it looks like the team had decided to consolidate the product feedback of a previously separate Ideas site onto the same community platform that powers the discussion forums. Sounds logical.

It turns out that the product team was reverting to an earlier forum that had existed since the early days of Power BI. How do I know? Because upon logging into the “new” community forum, I saw a bunch of achievement badges that had accumulated into my user profile. For an idea that I had submitted almost one decade ago. Posted back in 2015 when Power BI was new and Dynamics CRM was still called CRM, this requested feature had thankfully been implemented since:

There’s a bit more to this forum migration than meets the eye. You see, when deciding to unify everything onto the old community site powered by Lithium, the Fabric team had decided to leave the Power Platform based technology behind. Here’s an archived version of what the old Fabric Ideas site, running on Power Pages, looked like:

Given how Power BI has in practice been separated from the Power Platform and given a proper home under Microsoft Fabric, this is not a surprising decision for the team. What it raises questions about, though, is the strategy that Microsoft has around user feedback/idea management. Or more precisely: is there a strategy at all?

Dogfooding your own customer service tools

A corporation the size of Microsoft will in practice always be running software from vendors that can be considered its competitors. That’s not a surprise as such - rather a fact of enterprise IT life. Especially in areas where the internal product offering is only in the process of maturing enough to become enterprise grade enough for MS, other tools need to be used. That’s been the story for CRM and other business apps earlier, too.

For a long time, Microsoft was collecting user ideas for Office 365 related products via UserVoice, a popular third-party solution. Dynamics 365 Customer Service is the closest product in Microsoft’s own portfolio that should be able to address this kind of community suggestions management. Now, since it’s a traditional back-office business app, it required something extra to offer external access for customers to interact with Dataverse data. Meaning, the web portal part.

In November 2021, the Microsoft product feedback portal went live. “Built on Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Feedback is where users can go to provide feedback on Microsoft 365 apps and services in one place,” said the announcement.

After all these years, it still says “(Preview)” in the home page of the Feedback portal. The site design is… “minimalistic”, to use a neutral word. The contrast to Microsoft’s product marketing sites is drastic. Even compared to the product user community sites, the appearance of this feedback site (that doesn’t even seem to have any consistent name) is such that it makes you question whether it’s a legit production portal at all.

It is, though. You could also spin up a site that looks and functions exactly like this with an hour’s worth of effort. The Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community app is a Power Apps Portals template that anyone with Customer Service licenses can deploy. I say “Power Apps Portals” here because the template has not been updated to support the modern Power Pages editing experience.

Above is an example of a demo site that I created on one of my M365 tenants. There is hardly any visible difference between this one and the official Microsoft site. I don’t want to make the demo site public because there’s a risk that someone might mistakenly assume it’s a proper product feedback site. (Plus, the traffic could end up costing me dearly, given how every anonymous user burns $0.15 worth of licensed capacity.)

Hello, anybody there?

Setting up a feedback website as a technical exercise isn’t too difficult then. It’s all about what happens after the site is up. What process do you have in place internally to triage the incoming ideas, comments, and votes? Because the whole idea of the Community app is that someone will use the admin side to manage the stage (external, internal) of the idea after it lands in as “New”:

In a previous article, I wrote about an example where Power Platform capacity management features requested repeatedly by many admins over the years were finally delivered. And it almost went unnoticed. Still today, the ideas requesting for this feature to be developed remain as “New” in the Power Apps ideas site, many months after the feature has been shipped.

It’s not just about Power Platform. While some product teams may well be actively reviewing and commenting on the ideas posted on the Microsoft Feedback portal, many are obviously not. How can we tell? Because the feedback portal data proves this.

Let’s look at Microsoft Planner as an example. As I’ve previously written about the incredible story behind Planner Premium and Power Automate support, I’ve occasionally checked back on items to see what others are posting about it. While doing this, I did a quick filtering of the ideas on MS Feedback portal to check if the Planner product team is active there. The result is obvious: no one is acting on the ideas. Because in 2 years’ time, only a single feedback item on the Planner feedback forum has been moved to a state that is different than “open”:

In relation to the feature request for supporting Planner Premium plans in automation scenarios, an active thread exists also under the Microsoft Graph feedback forum. Want to guess how many feedback items in that forum are in a non-open status? Yes, exactly one! As a result, what are the chances for anyone posting there to ever get a response from Microsoft?

I checked the top 10 forums in terms of feedback items posted. The stats on how many of the items have moved beyond the initial “open” status isn’t very encouraging. There’s a big difference between product teams, though. Check out the number of ideas and the percentage of non-open items:

Microsoft Teams gets a huge number of ideas in the forum, but they also are able to process at least some of them. The product teams behind Outlook and Word are doing a good job in responding. SharePoint - you’re as likely to win in the lottery as getting your idea status updated. Microsoft To Do is still waiting for any idea to get any response, after over 6k ideas posted by the community members on its forum.

I would like to see someone from Microsoft look at these numbers and say that they are acceptable. Because no matter how much you would repeat the phrase of “Microsoft is listening”, it makes precious little difference to the customers that are seeing practically no signs of life on the official feedback forums. This is not a channel for product telemetry collection. Forums that explicitly imply the users can expect a response by stating 12 different possible status values for ideas require human interaction. Today, that is almost completely missing.

There can(not) only be one forum

The way things have historically gone, one is more likely to get a new idea forum than a response from Microsoft for an idea submitted to an existing one. The below comment from a user in the Fabric Community captures the sentiment of customers that have been working with these MS products for a longer time than most of the current product team members:

“It’s total anarchy out there.” Yep, it certainly feels like that for the users at times. Not only are there a variety of different platforms and experiences for feedback. As the products get rebranded and reimagined, it may not be at all obvious for regular users to understand which team is collecting what feedback under which forum. For example, do the customers leveraging Dynamics 365 CE understand that a big part of their ideas should be categorized as Power Apps features and posted on a different site?

Then there’s the actual UX challenges of the chosen web platforms. Ranging from general poor usability and site performance to data getting lost (as mentioned in the Fabric example above), it certainly requires some patience from customers to navigate all these obstacles in Microsoft’s feedback maze. When there is development done on these platforms, quite often it is primarily in order to serve the internal needs of Microsoft’s organization.

One example is how the Power Platform Communities were migrated onto Power Platform in 2024. Before that, the Dynamics 365 Community forums were launched on the same platform. The power users of these forums were not exactly thrilled to see the change from a mature online community product like Lithium (now called Khoros) to a new MS built software solution. There’s a lot for MS to gain by building up the missing features and testing with a live audience, sure. For the users - well, they’ll just need to accept the new UX and features or abandon the forums.

The problem is that when it comes to communities, people are choosing to spend their time and energy voluntarily. This isn’t business software they have to use, nor are they getting compensated for it. If it feels like a burden, they’ll just not bother. When I wrote my earlier article titled “Product ideas in the void”, I received comments from readers about how they had already given up on the whole concept:

That doesn’t mean the feedback would not be shared by these people at all. It just moves to social media instead.

When product feedback and improvement ideas are shared on social media channels, they often get a lot of likes and comments. When you go and look at the official MS forums for the same ideas, it’s dead quiet. Even if you provide links to the idea items (and thereby reduce the visibility of your social media post, thanks to algorithms punishing external URLs), only a tiny percentage of readers that support your idea on LinkedIn will upvote it on an idea forum.

It is therefore only natural that people resort primarily to social media posts. I know I sure do it. Whenever coming across similar snarky takes on obvious product feature gaps, such as this Power BI DAX editor UX mess, I feel a strong connection with the community members fighting for the right cause, using the means that they have. Or should I rather say “memes”?

These days, I regularly see individual Microsoft employees engage with LinkedIn posts. These folks obviously do care about the features being developed meeting the real needs of the users. They are effectively doing what the central feedback platforms set up by Microsoft should have enabled at scale. Acknowledging that the ideas expressed by the passionate community members are seen - and sometimes even added to the backlog and delivered.

The little things do matter. Quite often the product features that get most celebrated by community members on social media are addressing pain points that power users frequently run into. Like being able to reorder items in canvas apps tree view by drag & drop rather than through a death by thousand clicks. Imagine how much good will has been thrown away by MS during the 5 years that users have been voting on the idea with no response at all?

The state of Microsoft’s product idea and feedback management reminds me of the unfortunate Dynamics 365 projects where a sizeable CRM system was built according to customer specifications and then - nothing changed. No one adopted the technical solution that was missing the connection to and support from everyday business processes. This is what appears to be happening to Microsoft’s own efforts to use products like Dynamics 365 Customer Service Communities yet lacking the buy-in from top leadership to truly make the customer ideas count in how MS products are developed.

In-product feedback

Being a software product company, Microsoft of course has some more digital tools at their disposal for customer insights data collection. In addition to the various web portals where users can go and provide their feedback, Microsoft also collects feedback via in-product experiences.

I’ll just post a “did you know” tidbit about this feedback collection before ending the article. Because it sure was news to me that those feedback form responses and NPS survey answers can be viewed in the Microsoft 365 admin center of your tenant. With the respondent’s name written on them:

“Administrators can view, delete, and export the feedback data for their organizations in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This functionality assists administrators to provide direct transparency into their users’ experiences with Microsoft 365 products and enables user feedback data to be provided as part of any Data Subject Request.”

Only Global Admins or the Compliance Administrator role users can read the feedback data. Still, in case you ever added comments into those dialogs about how your own IT department is stupid by forcing you to use crappy tools like this - well, someone outside Microsoft may have also viewed them…