I am a great fan of the Microsoft Teams uservoice site. Looking at the number of ideas that have been raised over the past year or so you would expect that the Microsoft Team development team must be drowning in ideas.
What has changed over the last 2 months?
A while back I gave a a list of top 10 features that are coming up in Microsoft Teams. I’ve compared the list then with the list now:
| Position | 6 September 2017 | 27 October 2017 |
| 1. | External Access and Federation | Guest Access |
| 2. | Use same presence as Skype for Business | Support for Private Channels |
| 3. | Please create a professional compact chat layout! | Use same presence as Skype for Business |
| 4. | Ability to see who is in a channel | Complete Skype for Business Integration into Teams |
| 5. | Allow use of existing OneNotes/documents for channels | Please create a professional compact chat layout! |
| 6. | Code snippets | Ability to see who is in a channel |
| 7. | Ability to archive channels and chats | Allow use of existing OneNotes/documents for channels |
| 8. | Hide the reply button under every message | Code snippets |
| 9. | Enable screen sharing without video call | Ability to archive channels and chats |
| 10. | I want to use multiple Teams accounts at the same time | Enable screen sharing without video call |
So almost 2 months later and other than the items having been reordered I can see much change as even the top item seems to be just renamed.
Roadmap
2 months ago I really needed better recording options within Microsoft teams. But that seems to have gone down the queue. Time to have a look at the Roadmap for Microsoft Teams then it looks like there is an item for Cloud Recording that might give me what I want. Of course I would like to know when this is planned to appear in Microsoft Teams. Yet another roadmap document is available:
Here again I find Cloud recording. And it seems to be planned for end of Q2 2018.
So now by the time that I have personally lost the need for recording video calls, the item is on the list to be implemented. Of course I would still like to see this item arrive but there are other higher priorities for me.
So does it make sense to still add items to the uservoice list?
Of course it is still important to get your ideas over to Microsoft, but it will get harder to make your voice out there, but how do you compete with over 3000 ideas?
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On the other side: When there are almost 3000 other ideas, how unique is yours? I think with that massive pile of user voice basis it is more about supporting and contributing to ideas than pushing in dublicates. On the other hand you are free to marketing for support of your own idea..
I totally agree that it is very important to check first that your idea hasn’t been submitted already. Quite often I do find that ideas/issues etc already exist, but this is not always the case. Also with the massive amount of items in the list it does become harder to find matching issues.