Discussion Board Feature

 Overview

Make your SharePoint look and act like a real Discussion Board!

KWizCom's SharePoint Discussion Board Feature provides a full set of familiar internet Discussion Board features that you can easily customize to match the look & feel of your SharePoint implementation.

As we look to drive greater value from our IT investments, more and more organizations are leveraging their SharePoint platforms for a greater range of organizational functions, including as a Discussion Board.  However, SharePoint forum lists do not include some of the very basic features we have all come to expect in a real Discussion Board.
 
Now, with KWizCom's Discussion Board Feature, you can make SharePoint look and act like a real Discussion Board! This means you can manage multiple discussion boards by group and/or subject, including the handling of abusive and helpful posts, as well as get helpful usage statistics. What's more, your users get robust editing capabilities for graphic and textual content.

The business need

SharePoint forum is just another type of list template which enables saving posts and replies. The gap between the SharePoint forum lists and real Discussion Boards services (like those available on the internet) is quite big, and includes some very basic and critical missing features such as:

• There is no discussion board index that enables managing multiple discussion boards under groups/subjects.
• Editing capabilities are very limited
• No ability to control the visibility of specific discussion boards
• No out-of-the-box ability to manage abusive/helpful posts
• No discussion board statistics
• Limited Look N feel - SharePoint forums look like lists...very far from Internet-style forums.

Key Features & Benefits

Feature	KWizCom Discussion Board Feature	SharePoint 2007	SharePoint 2010
Easier to use, slick, internet-style discussion boards interface		A simple list	A simple list
Display discussion board statistics
Forum Index (Group discussion boards by subject)
Ability to publish a discussion board
Enable searching discussion boards in topics, posts, author and easily define the search scope – all embedded in the discussion boards interface.		Search only the entire list or entire site	Search only the entire list or entire site
Manage abusive posts
RSS Subscriptions at the discussion board level
RSS Subscriptions at the discussion thread (topic) level
Display top contributors by post count, by answers and by helpful posts (as judged by other users)
Display discussion summary statistics (forum count, thread count, post count, last post info)
Advanced editing capabilities: Emoticons, Flash, movie clips and Silverlight support, easily attach files and more			Partial support
Central management of multiple forums distributed across multiple sites
Fully customizable through CSS and user controls
Control users’ ability to edit/delete posts per discussion board
Display relative timestamps (e.g. "Posted 2 hours 30 minutes ago")
Cross-browser		Partial support	Partial support
Multi-lingual