Microsoft TechNet Forums Scraping

Scraping forums for market research

It is easy to scrape Microsoft TechNet Forums and normalize the resulting information to have a better idea of each thread’s rank based on views and initial publication date. Knowing how issues are ranked can help a company choose what to focus on.

This code can be used to scrape any of Microsoft TechNet’s forum. In the example below we scraped the App-V forum, since it is one of the application virtualization market’s leaders along with VMWare ThinApp, and Symantec Workspace Virtualization.

Original article: Scraping for Semi-automatic Market Research