What is an Office Community?

Monday, July 21, 2008

If you are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of conversing with others over the Internet, don't worry. Once you take the plunge and join in, you'll find that working with discussion groups is not as difficult as you might think.

An Office Community is an online forum where you can interact with fellow Office users, get your questions answered, share ideas, and learn more about the Office products and technologies that interest you. This interaction with fellow Office users takes place in discussion groups (also known as newsgroups).

A discussion group is a place on the Internet where people interact by posting and reading messages about topics that are of interest to them and the rest of a community. Discussion groups in the Office Communities are organized by Office program, such as the Outlook New Users and Outlook Support discussion group. Each discussion group contains a number of discussion threads, each of which contains a series of related messages. Each individual message either responds to an earlier message, or addresses the overall discussion group topic in some way. In contrast to e-mail messages that are sent to specific individuals and visible only to them, messages posted in a discussion group are visible and available to anyone and everyone