More than one year ago VMware had a successful bunch of newsgroups where users can exchange ideas and hope to find vuluntary help from who was more experienced.
Two problems there: no official answers from VMware staff, technical difficulties for users with NNTP port blocked by corporate firewalls.
So VMware started a second, parallel, spontaneous support tool called Web Community, now revamped as VMware Technology Network (VMTN).
For a small period of time the large part of virtualization experts remained on newsgroups, avoiding web community for slowness of browsing each forum. But a huge difference moved all of them away from NGs: on web forums VMware staff actively answer, and many of them do so.
After more than one year I still subscribe 13 VMware newsgroups but posts are reduced to 1-2 per month. The only one still working at a decent post rate is the one about ESX Server (you know: the hardest product to manage, the hardest expert to find for help).
But who post on newsgroup always double post on web forums, also cause it’s a known fact that great and historic supporters like Petr Vandrovec, Massimo Re Ferre’, Kenji Kato, Bjørn Anders Jørgensen (to name a few) answer there now.