Skip to main content

Discussion Board in SharePoint 2013


There are some improvements in Discussion Board in SharePoint 2013.
When you create a new thread, the first thing you notice is the field "Question". With this field, you are categorizing whether the thread is for a normal discussion or should it be treated as a question.

If a thread is selected as "Question", and when users respond to the question, the person who asked the question can mark one of the answers as "Best Reply".

As shown above, there are two replies to this question. The first reply is chosen as "Best Reply". Observe that, the best reply is also displayed just below the question. What I observed is only one reply can be chosen as "Best Reply".
Another feature which increases the user experience is the way one can provide Reply. When you open the discussion thread, user get an option to reply on the same screen as shown below.

Featured Discussion – Discussion Thread can be marked as "Featured". It is like flagging certain discussion threads.

 

Views in Discussion Board
With the above features explained, also comes with them are some views.
In AllItems.aspx page, you get to choose the following views:
Recent – Lasted modified discussions
My Discussions – Logged in user's discussions
Unanswered questions – Questions which are not answered yet
Discussions with best replies – Questions which have got answer
Featured – The thread which are marked as "Featured".
Management – This view as I understand provides a summary view of the threads as shown below. Against each thread, it also displays number of replies and if it is a featured discussion.

Also notice the new ribbon section called "Moderation". Basically, this can be used to Mark/Unmark thread(s).
Who can get access to "Moderation" tab? These controls were not available for user from Member group. Owner could able to get access to these controls. Which specific permission, if any, is required for moderation is not known at this moment.

Comments

  1. is it possible to know if an item in the discussion board has been marked as a question or not?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Veny, sorry for the delayed response. Discussion List has a column Question, which is of type Yes/No. This column value should be of your use (though I've not checked practically).

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to get SharePoint List or Library GUID via REST

Sometimes, you would need List or Library GUID to use that in some operation. In such cases, how do you get hold of GUID using REST API? There is a straight-forward end point which you can use: /_api/web/lists/getByTitle('ListTitle')/Id This will return the GUID of a List or Library. There is also another approach. However this approach works only if a List or Library contains at least one item. /_api/web/lists/getByTitle('ListTitle')/items This is a familiar end point which we use to fetch items of a List or Library. To get the GUID from the response, you would do: var listIDTemp = response.data.d.results[0].__metadata.id; var listID = listIDTemp.substring(listIDTemp.lastIndexOf("guid") + 5).split('\'')[0]; As you can see, we are doing string operations to fetch GUID from metadata.id. This contains information only if the response has at least one item.

Get User Id using REST or JavaScript Object Model

Sometimes you would need to fetch the User Id based on either Login name or Email id. You would need User Id if you need to assign a user object to a people picker control or People/Group field. How do we get the Id based on Email or Login Name in client side development? We can achieve that using JavaScript Object Model or REST API. Let me share the first example using JavaScript Object Model (JSOM). var context = new SP.ClientContext.get_current(); this.user = context.get_web().ensureUser(loginName or Email); var o = { d: d, user: this.user }; context.load(this.user); context.executeQueryAsync(     Function.createDelegate(o, ensureUserSuccess),     Function.createDelegate(o, Fail) ); The above code fetches User Id for a given Login Name or Email Id. Interestingly, there is no equivalent endpoint available in REST! The Microsoft documentation talk about a endpoint but I could not get it working. So what is the way to get User Id using REST? You have to use the hidd

All about SharePoint List View Styles

Sometimes, there are out of the box features which we tend to ignore and later when we do apply, we are more than happy about the feature which is readily available in SharePoint. One such feature is List View Style. I never thought I would write a post on this. However, whenever I spoke about this with users, people were excited to see the result. That prompted me to write this post. Instead of getting into only theory part, I will basically take use cases where these styles can be applied and also touch up on on some minor limitations with certain style. When you are creating/modifying a List view, you will get an option to select View Style. As shown below, there are 8 options available and Default is always set if you ignore this style. List of View Styles I will take typical Contact List and Announcement List to explian about these styles. Let us go one by one. Default: This view, as name suggest, is the default style in a view. This is one of the widely seen style