In this video, we explore how to navigate Social Squared Discussion Board for Teams and SharePoint. You’ll learn how to access forums, create topics, access different views such as Recent Topics, Recent Activities, and how to Search for content.
Navigating Social Squared
There are many different views within Social Squared that can be used to display the content in different ways. In this section, we will explore the three main views which are:
- Forum Group
- Forum
- Topic
The Forum Group View is the initial view that you will see when navigating to a page containing Social Squared.
Forum Group View
The Forum Group View displays the Forum Groups specific to the SharePoint Site or Team that you are in. Each Forum Group is depicted by the darker gray bar shown in the below image. The Forum Groups can be expanded and collapsed by clicking them on the right-hand side of the bar. Collapsing a Forum Group helps you to focus on a specific forum group. It is also possible that your Site Owner or Team Owner has masked one or more of the Forum Groups from the SharePoint page or Teams Channel that you are currently on. Masking a forum group in the settings helps to display content that is more relevant to the current page or channel.
From the Forum Group View, you can access the menu in order to select other views such as Recent Posts, My Posts, Recent Activity etc. We will discuss the other views in more depth in the ‘Other Useful Views’ section.
The Search bar allows you to perform a search which will span all forum groups and forums, which helps you to find the content that you are looking for.
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Forum View
When you enter a forum by clicking the forum title from the Forum Group view, you will see the topics within the forum. Each Topic may contain symbols representing if the topic has been answered or contains a featured post, along with other information such as the average ratings for the Topic.
From the Forum view, you can read each topic, or create your own. To create your own, you can click ‘Add New Topic’. In a later section, we will discuss in more detail how you can create a new topic.
At the bottom of the Forum view, you will see pagination controls allowing you to see more topics within the forum than those that are currently displayed.
Using the Subscribe/Unsubscribe button, you can ensure that you receive notifications either through email or Teams notifications should a new topic be created within this forum.
In the next section, we will discuss how to navigate the Topic view.
Topic View
Once you have navigated into a topic, you will be able to reply to the main topic, or to the other replies.
Initially, the Topic and the replies to a topic will appear in a flat chronological view. You can click the Threaded View button if you wish to see the structure of the conversation. Each reply to the main topic will be indented. A reply to a reply will be indented twice, and so on.
If the topic contains many replies, and you wish to see if there is a reply that is marked as the answer or as featured, you can click the Show Answered or Show Featured buttons.
As well as subscribing to an entire forum, within the Topic View you can subscribe to that single topic. This is useful if no one has yet replied with an answer to a question, but you are also curious to know what the answer to the question is when it arrives.
You can sort the thread in several ways. The sorting options include by:
- Chronological
- Author
- Votes
- Likes
- Answered
- Featured
Feedback to posts can be given using Voting, Likes, and Emojis. The Voting and Like features are optional, so you may not see them within your forums.
If you wish to reply to the post, you can perform a straightforward reply, or use the “Reply with quote” feature. Reply with Quote will embed the post that you are replying to within your post.
Badges are also awarded for contributions to the forums. You’ll receive one point for replying to forum threads, and 3 points for having your reply marked as an answer. Additionally, if a post that you created is upvoted, you will receive 2 points. If it is downvoted, 2 points will be deducted. (Your Team Site Owner/Administrator can disable downvoting.) Those point levels are converted to badges next to your signature allowing you to demonstrate your contributions to the forum to gain credibility.