MS Connect – Getting a New Feature Added to Your Microsoft Solution

As an end user of Microsoft products, YOU have the ability to influence changes and improvements to the products you use to run your business – Office, Windows, SQL Server, Dynamics, etc.  That’s right, Microsoft has a website called Microsoft Connect where users can report product bugs or make suggestions for feature enhancements.

While this site has been in use for some time, we have never been encouraged to promote comments and suggestions for Microsoft Dynamics as much as we are today. This is partly due to the fact that Microsoft has changed their development process and release cadence. Historically, the software engineers went offsite for a product planning session and made a list of features that were going to be added to the next release of the product that was scheduled to ship 2 years later. With the releases now being planned every six months, the engineers are reviewing suggestions on Microsoft Connect every second week and regularly selecting and prioritizing features to be added to the next release.

Last month at a GPUG Chapter meeting the Dynamics GP Engineers stated “Microsoft is not getting enough new suggestions for features.”  As a Dynamics GP user, you likely perform tasks where you occasionally think, “it would save me a lot of time if I was just able to do…….x.”  What is ‘x’?  Go to Microsoft Connect, select the product you want to make a suggestion for, click join and create a new product suggestion, but make sure to include a brief explanation of ‘why’ you want that feature so the engineers have a clear understanding of the request.

While you are visiting Microsoft Connect take a few minutes to search existing product suggestions and vote on those that you see value in. By actively participating you will be influencing decisions for new features in the products you use every day – how cool is that?