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Have an Office question on your mind? Now's the perfect time to check out the new look of Office Communities and the new features available to help you share questions and answers with thousands of other Office users across the globe.

Would you like to get answers to your questions about Office directly from other people who are using Office products, including recognized technology experts (Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs))? Are you interested in tips from power users or developers? Do you have tips you'd like to share with others? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, take a look at what Office Communities have to offer.

To learn more about the great new features, keep reading or dive into the Office Communities now!

What is an Office Community?

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 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.

What's new in Office Communities?

Discussion groups continue to be a great forum for asking questions, getting answers to your questions, and answering questions others have asked. So how can the new features available in Office Communities make discussion groups even more useful for you? Here's a quick summary:

• Sign in  By participating in Communities, you have the chance to build a reputation, and to help build the reputations of others. Signing in helps establish a level of trust in Communities. Be sure to sign in for the best experience.
• Sign up to be notified  Find an interesting thread you'd like to read when others respond? You can sign up to receive e-mail notification when someone responds to a specific thread.
• Rate a post as helpful  When you read a particular post, you get to weigh in; was the information in the post helpful? Or not? Your vote counts to let others know that information in a post is helpful and worth reading.
• Rate a post as an answer  When someone answers a question you asked, you get to rate the response. Did it answer your question? Or not? This feature also allows you and others to show only answered questions in a discussion group.
• Show specific threads  Not only can you search by keyword to find the threads that have the information you need, but you can also show only threads with questions that have an answer, or only threads with posts rated as helpful. This helps you to get right to the information you need.
• Build a reputation  As you rate posts or answers as helpful, this builds the reputation of those who posted the information. Additionally, as you answer questions that others have, they can rate your posts and in doing so build your reputation.

Getting to Office Communities

In addition to the Communities and discussion groups links available on Office Online, you can also view or participate in Office Communities from your Office 2003 program. To search a discussion group in an Office Community for a specific issue when you can't find the answer in Help, click Get answers from other users under Other places to look in the Search Results task pane (task pane: A window within an Office application that provides commonly used commands. Its location and small size allow you to use these commands while still working on your files.). You can also visit discussion groups for your program by clicking the Communities link on the <Program Name> Help task pane in your Office 2003 program.