In my recent article Developers - How to Ask Good Questions When You Need Help, I shared my opinionated guidance on how to write good questions when you need help as a developer. All the points in that article are for general development questions - nothing specific to Microsoft 365 development.
One of the most popular questions I get from my students, attendees from sessions & workshops I deliver at conferences, and other developers is where are the best places to post questions about Microsoft 365 development topics?
Microsoft 365 developers have plenty of where to post questions. If you’ve purchased or enrolled in course with someone, you may have options to ask questions directly to the instructor or your peers in a private space. That’s what the Voitanos Community is for.
In this article, I’ll share the different forums I’d recommend you take a look at, which ones are my favorites and where I spend my time helping others.
These can be put in two different groups: forums managed by Microsoft and the inverse, forums managed by the community.
Microsoft-Managed Forums
Let’s start with the communities and options that are run and managed by Microsoft.
The official place to ask all questions about Microsoft products & services, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, is Microsoft Q&A:
The home for technical questions and answers at Microsoft. Get started asking, answering, and browsing questions about products like .Net, Azure, or Teams.
https://learn.microsoft.com/answers/
This site is similar to Stack Overflow in the sense that questions go into a big container and are categorized with tags. This following tags aren’t an exhaustive list of Microsoft 365 development topics, but it covers the majority of them:
- Microsoft 365
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Microsoft Graph
- Microsoft Teams
- Microsoft Teams Development
- Office Development
- SharePoint Development
- This include the SharePoint Framework (SPFx)
In addition to Microsoft Q&A, there are various GitHub repositories managed by Microsoft where you can ask questions related to various topics. The most popular ones are as follows:
- SharePoint/sp-dev-docs: SharePoint & Viva Connections Developer Documentation
- This contains the documentation for SharePoint & Viva Connections Developer Documentation, including the SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
- OfficeDev/teams-toolkit: Developer tools for building Teams apps
- This contains the documentation for Microsoft Teams.
- OfficeDev/office-js: Office JavaScript APIs & Office Add-ins platform
Community-Managed Forums
In addition to the Microsoft-managed forums, there are plenty of community based forums. Many people have created groups on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn… there are so many I’m not going to mention them here.
Andrew Connell
Microsoft MVP, Full-Stack Developer & Chief Course Artisan - Voitanos LLC.
Stack Overflow
Historically, Stack Overflow has been the go-to place for developer questions and discussions. One big difference between Stack Overflow & the Microsoft Q&A site is how tags are handled. On StackOverflow, there are a lot more tags compared to Microsoft Q&A.
That’s both a good and bad thing. For instance, if you have a question about a SharePoint Framework application customizer, should you tag it with sharepointframework, spfx, spfx-extension, all of them, or a combination of them?
There’s no rule here… it’s totally up to you and the community. That can make finding answers or making sure the right people see your question challenging.
One of my favorite resources is Reddit. Reddit has been referred to as the “homepage of the internet”. It’s organized into subreddits (aka: “subs”) that can be seen as categories of content. People post questions, discussion, share links, news… all sorts of things.
Some popular subreddits for Microsoft 365 developers include the following:
- r/microsoft365dev - 200+ members
- /r/sharepoint - 41K+ members
- /r/sharepointdev - 1.2K+ members
- /r/microsoftteams - 74K+ members
- /r/microsoft_365_copilot - 8.1K+ members
Discord
Discord, usually seen as a community host for gamers, is also a great place for developers. There are lots of different Discord servers setup for various Microsoft 365 communities, but the two most popular ones for developers are the following:
- Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Server - 18K+ members
- Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community - 2.8K+ members
What About the Voitanos Discord Server?
In 2022, I launched the Voitanos Community on Discord as a place for the community & students of Voitanos courses to ask questions about their courses & have discussions about Microsoft 365 development topics. However due to low adoption and other factors, this server is planned for retirement.
My Favorite Forums
So, this brings me to what would I recommend? Where would I ask questions?
When it comes to asking questions, I like using the following resources:
- Microsoft Q&A
After answering questions from students of my courses or readers who’ve left a comment on articles like this or my YouTube channel videos, those are the communities where you’ll find me answering questions and helping out.
Why Don't I Participate in the SharePoint GitHub Repo?
I used to answer a lot of questions and help triage issues in the sharepoint/sp-dev-docs repo for a long time. But, after enough people started attacking me for not fixing bugs - which I can’t do as I’m not a Microsoft employee - and some even said they wouldn’t take one of my courses because I didn’t care about the bugs they found, I finally stopped engaging.
I still help Microsoft with the SharePoint developer documentation in that repo, but I don’t make it a point to engage in issues. for the above reasons.
If I have a bug to report in the Microsoft 365 space, I prefer to use the different GitHub repos I mentioned above, like the sharepoint/sp-dev-docs repo for SPFx questions or the OfficeDev/teams-toolkit repo for Teams development questions. But I don’t like using the GitHub repos for questions Microsoft’s monitoring & responsiveness in them isn’t consistent. For instance, the sp-dev-docs repo has 1K+ open issues while the teams-toolkit only has ~250 open issues.
What About You - What Are Your Favorites?
Did I miss any communities that you think should get mention?
What are your favorites?
Leave a comment below and share your favorites or any communities you think should get mentioned here.
Microsoft MVP, Full-Stack Developer & Chief Course Artisan - Voitanos LLC.
Andrew Connell is a full stack developer who focuses on Microsoft Azure & Microsoft 365. He’s a 20+ year recipient of Microsoft’s MVP award and has helped thousands of developers through the various courses he’s authored & taught. Whether it’s an introduction to the entire ecosystem, or a deep dive into a specific software, his resources, tools, and support help web developers become experts in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, so they can become irreplaceable in their organization.
