Creating a Discussion Board

Quick reference

• 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.

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