Answer your own questions on Microsoft Q&A

  • Article

Microsoft Q&A supports users potentially answering their own questions on Microsoft Q&A. Sharing the answers to existing questions is very valuable for the rest of the users who might be facing the same question. There are few cases when this might happen:

  1. The question author asked the question on Microsoft Q&A and later they found the answer themselves after further investigation, talking to colleagues, or in a different non-public venue.
  2. A Microsoft support engineer got a question from a customer as a support ticket or another private venue and they found the answer will be beneficial for the larger community. Therefore, they post the question on behalf of the user together with the answer.

Guidelines

Once you provide the answer to the question (do not share yours or other's private and confidential information), make sure that:

  1. Provide a note where you found the answer, if applicable. For example, a Microsoft support engineer should say: "The question and answer were raised in a non-public venue.".
  2. Link to this article so people know the reason of self-answering.
  3. NEVER take credit from other user's work (plagiarism), so if somebody else offered you help privately, try to give credit.
  4. Leave the question open, so other members of the community can comment and add additional answers. Closing the question will prevent other users to add additional information or add answers down the road if the answer changes overtime.
  5. Do not bring content from another public site (MSDN or TechNet forums, Stack Overflow, etc.). Users will be able to find that content either via organic search or when they ask a question in Microsoft Q&A. There is not need to duplicate content in multiple places.
  6. The intent of this self-answering provision on Microsoft Q&A is to post questions that require detailed answers which provide a resolution to an issue impacting a broad range of customers. It's not intended to be used to post short informational items that would be better suited on a product/service summary page or listed as part of a frequently asked questions page.