This month, the Microsoft newsgroups were closed, but there were no clear cut direction for continued support. Other than announcements of their closing, little effort appears to have been done to highlight the new forums as the place to go for Visio support.
In the place of the thirteen Visio newsgroups, Microsoft has provided three forums:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-CA/visiogeneral/threads
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/visiogeneral/threads
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/addbuz/threads
There is no clear cut definition as to which one to use, but it appears that they are for general user questions and not for Visio developers. On the Answers forum, the Visio questions are buried in a forum shared with other Office products. Compared to the newsgroups, the volume of traffic is way down. Whether that is due to people having a hard time finding the forums or that the forums do not appear to be as easy to use as the former newsgroups is hard to tell. With the old newsgroups, it was easy to see the new posts and what has been read.
There is also a Microsoft forum for VSTO for some of the Visio questions, http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/threads, but there does not appear to be a forum for developers using VBA or creating shapes.
Only time will tell whether the Microsoft replacement to the newsgroups will adequately support the Visio community.
So what other Q&A resources are available for Visio users?
- 1. Fellow MVP, Chris Roth, has an excellent forum at his Visio Guy website. http://www.visguy.com/vgforum/
- 2. Visimation did have forums, but they are now closed.
- 3. Tek-Tips have had a Visio forum for a while, but traffic is very low. To give you an idea of how low, I am the top poster and I only have ten votes. In other forums, the top poster has several thousand votes. http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=172