Microsoft launches a Q&A site to replace MSDN and TechNet
The website will be fully up and running by mid-2020.
Back when Microsoft announced earlier this year that it would stop publishing MSDN Magazine, there was some worry about what it would mean for the company's MSDN and TechNet forums. Between the two of them, they had a lot of useful information on the company's enterprise-facing products. The answer, it turns out, is that Microsoft plans to migrate those databases to a new website called Microsoft Q&A.
The company describes the website as a way to get "relevant and timely answers to your technical problems from a community of experts and Microsoft engineers." To be clear, this isn't the place you'll go to if you need technical support as a consumer -- Microsoft has other, long-standing resources for that. Instead, it's where IT managers can find help with their Azure Cloud deployments, for example.
What's here will be familiar territory if you've used a Q&A site anytime in the past decade. When you start typing a query into the search bar, it'll attempt to find posts where someone may have answered your question already. Additionally, you can follow specific posts, tags and people to get updates. You can also earn points for answering reputation points for answering questions.
At the moment, the majority of available topics relate to the company's Azure Cloud platform. You can also find questions related to the Partner Center API and Universal Windows Platform. Microsoft plans to add more topics over the next few months.
