Introducing Microsoft Q&A (Preview)

This post was written by Sandra Aldana, Senior Program Manager, Developer Relations for Cloud + AI Division.

Important

May 2020 update: For latest update on Microsoft Q&A, please read our Microsoft Q&A has graduated to General Availability post.

For over 10 years the MSDN and TechNet Forums played a key part in enabling our customers to unblock their business scenarios by offering a platform where technical questions could be answered by Microsoft and the community . As time progressed, and technology evolved, the needs of the community grew beyond what the existing solution could provide. We started on a journey to identify a new, robust solution which would support our need to evolve the user experience.

We're excited to share an important milestone in the journey, introducing the preview release of Microsoft Q&A - the place to get answers to all your technical questions on Microsoft products and services.

Overview

The new Q&A experience will offer relevant and timely answers to your technical problems from a community of experts and Microsoft engineers and will open the door to a variety of new features and experiences, like:

  • Tag-based experience allows you to ask questions across products and services in a single place
  • Follow posts, tags, or people to get updates
  • Unified profile for single sign on across docs.microsoft.com
  • Suggested answers as you type your question to quickly identify possible existing answers
  • Bookmark content for future reference

Q&A home page

Microsoft Q&A is a natural extension of the docs.microsoft.com experience you've come to love:

  • docs.microsoft.com provides you with deep technical information about specific topics, including the recent addition of code samples to accelerate your learning journey.
  • Microsoft Learn allows you to master those topics by following step-by-step tutorials with interactive coding environments.

A migration of a resource this size is a massive undertaking. To ensure a smooth transition and minimize any disruption for users, we've broken down the migration into multiple phases. The goal is to complete the migration by mid-2020.

The launch today includes the following products/services and we will continue to add more services to this list during the upcoming months:

Check out the FAQ page to find out all the details.

Here is an example on how to ask a question

Asking a question on Q&A

Here's how the question looks once posted.

Example of a posted question on Q&A

We want your feedback

We would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us and share your feedback through our feedback channel.