[Yves Dhondt]

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...&lang=en&cr=US
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...t/topics?hl=en
http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/...ement/2010-04/
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversat...x?groupid=1416
....

All these are frontends which connect you to a much older underlying
technology: news groups (nntp). Rather than using one of these sites, you
could use a client which is specifically made to access newsgroups. Examples
are Outlook Express (http://www.gmayor.com/MSNews.htm), Windows Mail,
Mozilla Thunderbird, ...

The 'social' forums, like the 'answers' one you pointed out were intended as
successors to the old newsgroup technology. However, they don't seem to be
all that popular. Personally, I doubt they will work. Answering questions in
them is a lot harder than it is in newsgroups.

Yves

"BobW" wrote in message
...
This group, under Office Online, located he

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...&lang=en&cr=US

...contains years of threads. But this forum, and other Office Online
program forums, periodically become unsearchable. (I guess their indexes
get
screwed up or something.) Also, it emails links to responses back to me,
but
the links often fail to work, for months at a time...then magically start
working again briefly, then mysteriously stop working again.

The material in the Office Online forums, is also findablee through Google
(if I search for something with Google, one of these forum answers may
appear). But then I need to also maintain and remember a google account
name
and password.

Now there's yet another Word forum....under Microsoft Answers...located
he

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/o...ult.aspx#tab=2

I really like the look and feel of this one. That is, i did, for a few
seconds, when I first accessed it this morning. A few minutes later, it
was
'temporarily unavailable due to system maintenance'. I guess that's
reassuring...? Is this a new home for Word user forums, or a new
interface
into the old forum, or....what? Does this contain all the threads from
the
old Office Online forum? And is the Search function here, going to
really
work for all product questions without periodically becoming broken? Will
this one email me a working return link when someone answers my post? This
one wants me to create and remember yet another display name, in addition
to
the identity I already use for the Office Online forums and the Google
identity. I guess I can do that.

But sometimes by the time I log into one place, answer the phone a couple
of
times, try to find something, have someone walk into my office with a
problem, discover search is broken, respond to an urgent Instant Messenger
message, log in somewhere else, forget what my username was, go look it
up,
and get distracted by a slew of urgent emails, I've forgotten what I was
looking for.