SharePoint Online Discussion Board Basics

what I want to focus on for this video is discussion lists in a SharePoint team site so here I am on my team site and what you'll find here is that the moment there are no options for a discussion list now we need to add that because it's not a standard component that's already part of a team site by default so to add a component we go into site contents here on the left hand side in the quick launch menu and then what we'll find is is that we need again to go in and select the option to add an app so this is going to add the discussion list item app to our SharePoint site so again all we need to do is basically work through the apps that are available to us and again there are a number of standard ones and there are also some ones that have been added from the SharePoint store now what you'll find in here is the option for a discussion board so we select that up to add it and let's call this discussion list customer follow-up so we know what it's all about and we'll simply go create now what that will do is we'll add the app to our team site as you can see here and it will also list it under recent in the quick launch menu so you can get to the customer the discussion list simply by selecting it from either location and here we are in our customer follow-up so what I'm going to do basically now is just create a new discussion so what I'll go do is go in here and ask a question basically something like how are we going with Khan toso order ok so again I can I can put in here exactly what I'm after so let me just pause the video while I add some text to that ok you can see that I filled in the text in the body here what I can do is select it and let it know that it is a question so it's question being asked to other members now you'll notice that when I start typing in the text here you'll see that the ribbon becomes exposed so this gives me a number of editing options so for example I can go in here and I can make that bold and I could for example change the color and maybe make it some other color to highlight that information which you've got the full range of editing options available to you from the ribbon now once I've done that I'll select save and that will save a new discussion to that discussion list for me now if I select that I'll go in there and you'll see basically the question that I've asked and I can go in there obviously and reply and edit it if I want and using the ellipse there are some additional options now one of the options may be something like alert me so what alert me will do is it will set up an email notification when something changes so if you've asked a question and you're not in here regularly checking you may want to go in there and set up an email alert to let you know when someone does update some information so again that is the discussion list what we'll do is we could obviously go in and we can add more discussion so different topics and you'll see that we have a number of different views we can look at unanswered questions and my discussions but what we'll do now is we'll just wait and see if anybody replies to this okay so if we go back into our discussion now what we'll find is that we should in fact have an answer to our question or apply at least so yes we do you'll see that I've replied to Louis's question and the informations down the bottom there so Lois can obviously go in here and he can make a further reply about all the information to thanking the reply for that information so that makes it nice and easy to keep track of exactly what's going on so we can just enter the reply here for that and then go reply so that again that will close out that discussion if we so elect to do that now you'll notice here that what we can do is obviously we can get a number of different replies to this question that we've asked and once we do get a lot of questions there what we want to do is probably close that question out to let people know that it has in fact being answered so once we've got the reply that we want you'll see that we can obviously again go in reply to these individually we can edit them if we have administrator rights but you'll notice here that if I pull down their lips I have the option to select this as a best reply so again that then marks that is the best reply and answers my question so in a nutshell what we need to do with discussions is is we need to add an app into our SharePoint team site and that will give us the ability to create a number of new discussions so we can have a number of discussion topics that we want inside those discussion topics we can then have people conversing backwards and forwards and answering questions about the topics that oppose we have the ability when we create a discussion item and the text in here to use the ribbon menu to add enhanced editing features bold underlined and whatnot so again very handy feature now the reason that you would use something like a discussion list is for a couple of reasons firstly it will reduce the amount of email because therefore all the discussions are made in SharePoint rather than being conducted directly in email the second option is is that all the information that you put in this SharePoint site is obviously indexed and can be searched so again in six months twelve months when you are looking for this sort of discussion you can just do a search and it will pop up so again this is a great way to foster collaboration and to also move information out of being siloed with an email so put it in a collaboration tool like SharePoint share the information ask the questions get the replies get all the people conversing together and sharing their knowledge in an area that everybody can access to so that's the heart and soul of what discussions are in a SharePoint team site once again I thank you very much for watching you

Channel: Robert Crane

Views: 47,314

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft SharePoint (Software), Microsoft Office 365 (Software)

Id: K00wFH8-q8E

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 19 2014