Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Add a Discussion Board to the team site to help organize and manage questions, feedback, and discussions.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
5.02 creating-a-discussion-board - Exercise.docx100.4 KB 5.02 creating-a-discussion-board - Exercise solution.docx
59.7 KB
Quick reference
Creating a Discussion Board
A template that we haven't looked at yet is the discussion board template. A discussion board help keeps conversations, discussions, and feedback organized. Instead of sending out an email to our team to get feedback on a topic and then going through all of the replies, we could post the question on the discussion board and all the replies will be in one place.
When to use
Create a discussion board whenever you want to post a question or discuss a topic and get feedback from the team.
Instructions
Creating a Discussion Board
- From the horizontal menu, click New.
- Click App.
- Type 'discussion' in the search bar and press Enter.
- Name the discussion board, 'TrainingQuestions'.
- Click Create.
- From Site Contents, click on 'TrainingQuestions'.
- Click New discussion.
- Enter a Subject.
- Tick the Question box.
- In the Body, type the question or the topic to discuss.
- Click Save.
The question is now posted and team members can open the discussion and post replies.
Views
Discussion Board topics can be viewed in 3 different ways: Recent, My discussions, and Unanswered questions.
- Recent - this view shows all recently posted topics for discussion.
- My discussion - this view shows all discussions posted by you.
- Unanswered questions - this view shows all topics that have yet to receive any replies.
More Options
- Click the three dots to see more options.
From here you can set up Alert Me notifications, make a post a featured topic or delete a post.
Add the Discussion Board to the Quick Launch
- From the Quick Launch menu, click Site Contents.
- Hover the mouse over the discussion board and click the three dots.
- Click Settings.
- Click List name, description and navigation.
- Select Yes to display on the Quick Launch menu.
- 00:04 Throughout this course, there's been a lot of discussion about Lists in SharePoint.
- 00:09 And we've seen that these lists are based on templates that help us store our
- 00:13 records within SharePoint.
- 00:15 But there is one specific list template that we haven't yet discussed that
- 00:20 can be really useful to you, and that is the Discussion Board List template.
- 00:26 Now you may be familiar with Discussion Boards, they have been around for
- 00:30 years and years.
- 00:31 In fact, I remember posting on Message Boards in the mid 90s,
- 00:36 which gives you an idea as to how old I am.
- 00:39 And to this day I still post and read discussion boards in particular,
- 00:43 the Microsoft Discussion Board and
- 00:45 you can create a discussion board that's kind of similar within SharePoint.
- 00:50 So why are Discussion Boards useful?
- 00:52 Well let's take a look at a scenario.
- 00:54 Maybe you are the team leader for this particular project,
- 00:58 and at the end of every week you send out an email to the rest of your team members,
- 01:03 asking them for a status update.
- 01:05 Where are they up to on their current tasks?
- 01:07 If you have quite a large team, you then might be bombarded with replies and
- 01:12 then have to manage all of those different replies.
- 01:15 So it's not really the most efficient way to be able to get and
- 01:19 receive that information.
- 01:21 What might be more helpful is to create a discussion board where you can post
- 01:25 the question at the end of the week, which means the discussion is not only
- 01:30 organized, it's not only easy to access for all team members, but
- 01:34 it's also a lot easier for you to manage.
- 01:37 So let's add a discussion board to our SharePoint site.
- 01:41 And as we know, we can add list templates by adding an app.
- 01:45 So I'm going to go to the new drop down, and I'm going to go down to App.
- 01:49 Remember, if you're adding this in the classic experience, you'll need to go to
- 01:54 the cog icon in the top right hand corner and go to Add an App from here.
- 01:59 Either one of these options is going to take you to exactly the same place.
- 02:02 Now I could scroll through and try and find the discussion board, but
- 02:05 I'm going to click in the search bar at the top and just type in discussion.
- 02:12 And click the magnifying glass to search, and there it is.
- 02:16 Let's click it to load it up.
- 02:18 Now the first thing I need to do here is give my discussion board a name.
- 02:21 So I'm just going to call this Training Questions, and click Create.
- 02:28 Once again, it's going to jump me to my site contents page and
- 02:31 I can then go through this list and find my discussion board.
- 02:36 And there it is down the bottom, Training Questions.
- 02:39 Let's click to jump into there and this is essentially the discussion board.
- 02:44 Now currently it's empty because I haven't created or started a new discussion.
- 02:48 I haven't posted anything yet.
- 02:50 And you can probably see at the top here how simple this is.
- 02:53 If I want to post a question for
- 02:54 my team, I can simply click on the New Discussion button at the top here.
- 02:59 So I'm going to give this a subject.
- 03:01 So I'm going to call this Training Room Bookings, and
- 03:06 this is going to be a question that I'm posing to the rest of my team.
- 03:11 So the next thing I'm going to do is click in the question box.
- 03:15 And this just lets SharePoint know that I'm asking a question, and
- 03:18 I want to receive answers.
- 03:21 So in the body, I'm going to type in my question.
- 03:23 Can you please confirm that the training rooms have been booked for
- 03:26 your particular region?
- 03:28 Let's click on Save to add that to the discussion board, and there we go.
- 03:32 It is as simple as that.
- 03:34 And if somebody wants to reply to this message,
- 03:38 all they need to do is open up the discussion item, and
- 03:43 underneath there is a reply button.
- 03:46 Straight away you can see that this keeps all discussions together in a neat and
- 03:52 organized way.
- 03:53 It just makes it a lot easier to manage feedback here.
- 03:56 If I click back on Training Questions just to go back to that main page,
- 04:00 you can also see that we have some other tabs at the top here,
- 04:03 so I'm currently clicked on recent.
- 04:05 So that's going to show any discussions that have been started recently.
- 04:09 I can then click on my discussions which will show any
- 04:12 discussions that I've started, and then I can click on Unanswered Questions, and
- 04:17 it will show any discussions that haven't received any replies.
- 04:21 Now you might be thinking, well, you just replied to this one, so
- 04:24 why is it showing there?
- 04:25 And the reason why it's showing there is because it's recognizing that that I
- 04:29 created the discussion, and I'm also replying.
- 04:32 So if another team member was to come and reply to this,
- 04:35 it wouldn't appear under Unanswered Questions.
- 04:38 Now if I jump back into this discussion,
- 04:40 you can see that we also have an Edit button.
- 04:43 So if you want to make any changes you can and if we click on the three dots,
- 04:47 we have that Alert Me feature underneath there as well.
- 04:50 So again, if you want to set up alerts on this discussion board so that you're
- 04:54 notified when anybody replies to this discussion, you can definitely do that.
- 04:58 You can even mark this discussion as featured.
- 05:01 So if I click this, this discussion is always going to be at the top.
- 05:06 And of course, I can also delete the discussion if it's no longer relevant.
- 05:11 Now once again, by default, you'll notice that the discussion board doesn't
- 05:15 automatically go into that quick launch menu.
- 05:18 So remember if you do want it showing in there, we need to go to site contents.
- 05:23 Let's find a discussion board.
- 05:26 Click the three dots and go into setting, and
- 05:28 remember this is under Lists name, description and navigation.
- 05:34 And from here we can say yes,
- 05:35 we want to display this on the Quick Launch menu and click on Save.
- 05:40 So now when I go back to home, I can see Training Questions is right at the bottom
- 05:45 here, and of course you can reorganize this list as we've seen many times before,
- 05:50 and move this into the correct part of the menu.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.