Note: This guide is for the 2007 and earlier SharePoint Products. Forums for the 2010 SharePoint products can be found here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/sharepoint2010 Very roughly General is for Pre-Sales and other kinds of General questions. This therefore includes things like which SharePoint versions there are; Licensing; asking for general suggestions on which approach to take; and questions on "is there a product for X?". It also includes questions on Application Templates because these aren't part of the installed product and thus don't fit in for instance Admin. What it doesn't include are questions on a specific problem - "I can't access the SP site"; "I'm getting error message Y"; Where is Z in Central Admin?; stsadm questions etc. etc. All specific questions that aren't about anything covered in forums like Search; Workflow etc. and that are connected broadly speaking with Administration, go to the Setup..Admin forum. These days (2010) I'm moving all such questions that come to General to the Admin forum. General is also not for duplicate posts. If there are duplicate posts I will delete all but one of the threads at random. The three forums Setup/Admin; Design/Customization and Development/Programming are the general (small g) forums for problems in those areas that don't fit in any of the more specific forums. Roughly Setup/Admin is Installation issues and Administering the product as delivered; Design/Customization is for site customization i.e. amending the supplied code typically with SPD 2007 and Dev/Programming is for programming/coding issues (i.e. new code/ new functionality) often using VS - this is where you will find creating web parts; using web services; writing event handlers etc. etc. The next bunch of forums are all much more specific and questions on those topics are correctly placed (only) in them even if for instance they also would fit in one of the above three. BDC Excel Services (the function of MOSS Enterprise - not Excel questions) InfoPath/Forms Services Search Workflow (programming workflow using VS comes here ...) are all pretty straightforward and cover what they say they cover. Accessibility deals only with Accessibility issues for the physically challenged Community Advancement has become a place for posting notices of User Group meetings. Business Intelligence and Social Computing aren't named as clearly but in fact like the above 7 are also specialist forums that get all the messages in the areas they cover. Business Intelligence: SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) with SharePoint; KPI Social Computing: MySite; Blogs; Wikis and even things that call themselves "X for Social Computing :) I personally don't like the term social computing and just see this forum as a place to collect ALL the MySite questions/answers; all the Blog questions/answers etc. for easier research into MySite/Blog etc. problems Then there a couple of less-clear cut forums at least to me and where I mostly leave the posts that seem off-topic to me there. Enterprise Content Management - where's the line between this and Admin? Collaboration - clearly things about ECTS are on-topic but is anything else ? ----------------------------------------- Then there's a seemingly SharePoint forum that isn't in this group of forums. SharePoint Online you'll find here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicessharepoint/threads/ ------------------------------------ Then we have some products related to SharePoint that DON'T belong in any of the SharePoint forums. Search Server 2008 Express - has it's own set of forums that have just been moved to the new forum structure. Access them here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/searchserver Performance Point Server 2007 - has it's own set of forums here http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/performancepointserver/ Project Server 2007 where the Project Server people have in a post here http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/projectserver/thread/b333d85f-f43c-4815-9c30-b161615794e0 written that until forums are available, Project Server 2007 questions should go to the Project (Server) newsgroups Project Server Forums became available at the end of 2009: The Project Server forums here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/projserv2010setup/threads have 2010 URLs but non-2010 questions are not excluded by the MS posts in the three forums there saying which posts should go those forums. Team Foundation Server - there are several Team Foundation Server forums included in the "Visual Studio Team System" group here http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/vsts/ Team Foundation Server - Admin is for instance here http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfsadmin/threads/ and Team Foundation Server - General is here http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfsgeneral/threads/ SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 users should either post to the SBS newsgroup at microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs (msnews.microsoft.com) or if they have Partner status to the Partners-only SBS forum here http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/partnerwinserversbs (The browser address for the above-mentioned SBS newsgroup is http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs) (June 2010) There is a SBS forum here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbusinessserver/threads Commerce Server 2009 users' questions go to http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/commserver2009/threads/ Windows Storage Server 2003 is a operating system that is only for NAS systems and which is only available from OEMs. The R2 version of this (2006) included WSS 3.0. Like SBS 2003, using this platform isn't covered here. There is no forum that I can find - for instance in the Windows Server group - and so probably support will come in the forums of the OEM that supplied Storage Server 2003. Questions on all of the first three get moved to Off-topic along with a message giving the above-mentioned links. (It is impossible to Move a thread from a "new" forum to an "old" forum. Posting to Off-Topic preserves the text of the post for copy/paste into the other forum or newsgroup)) Questions to the TFS forum, I try to move directly to the correct TFS forum if I have time (they are only in social.msdn.microsoft.com and I use social.technet.microsoft.com usually) Questions on Data Protection Manager 2010 with a SharePoint 2007 product go to http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dpmsharepointbackup/threads/ which is a forum called "DPM SharePoint Protection" Later: Performance Point Server 2007 added to this post on the 23rd of january 2009 following a minor deluge of posts here on it. (All moved to Off-Topic) Later still: TFS added to this post on the 18th of February 2009 following a couple of TFS posts in rapid succession. Even later: SharePoint Online added here on the 21st of February 2009 after one person asked where it was; was redirected to "What is the Forum for ...?"; posted there and then posted (himself) the answer there! (Thanks whoever you were) Even later: SBS 2003 and 2008 section added. Even later than even later (!) Commerce Server 2009 reference added after a Commerce Server 2009 post appeared in a SharePoint forum. Later still: Information on the DPM SharePoint Protection forum added. When posting to a forum you should remember that you are one of many people who have questions that are equally as important to them as your questions are to you. DO NOT in any way try to push your question in front of the queue either by saying that it is urgent or that you want it asap (etc.) or by trying to attract attention to your post by adding non-relevent information to the Title such as more than one question mark or one or more exclamation marks or "Help me". All these things will be removed and if the same poster continues to use these techniques their posts which use the techniques will be deleted. Please also try to avoid adding a question to a "closed" thread [one marked as having been answered] - especially one where the previous post was a long time ago (say, more than six months). In such cases you should start a new thread. I have started locking closed threads where the original poster has confirmed that his problem was solved in order to reduce the temptation to add questions to closed threads. (It is much simpler to find an answer to a problem by searching threads of (say) four posts where the problem was stated in the first post, than by searching a a thread of (say) thirty posts where different questions appear throughout the thread. P.S. KSDN asked in an off-topic response here why there were still newsgroups for SharePoint products and why MS doesn't consolidate support in one place. The problem is that the newsgroups are not under MS's control; the forums are. Thus MS can remove MS support from the newsgroups and encourage (for example) MVPs to support the forums not the newsgroups, but in effect they can't easily get rid completely of the newsgroups. WSS FAQ sites: WSS 2.0: http://wssv2faq.mindsharp.com WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007: http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com Total list of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Books (including foreign language titles) http://wss.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3 FAQ/V Books.aspx