• What is a Discussion List in SharePoint?
• How to create a Discussion List?
• Creating a new Discussion in SharePoint Discussion Board
• Responding to the Discussion
• Benefits of Discussion Board
• Different views on Discussion Boards.
• Making Discussion as Featured
• Summary

What is Discussion List in SharePoint?

Let’s understand this Discussion List in detail by considering a scenario as below.

How to create a Discussion List?

Step 1

Open the Site Content page by clicking on the "Settings" icon and then clicking “Site Contents”.

Step 2

This will open the "Site Contents" page. Click on the “Add an app” icon from this screen.

Step 3

Search for “Discussion” in the search box and then click on the “Discussion Board” icon link.

Step 4

Now, enter the name of the Discussion Board and click on the “Create” button.

Once you hit the “Create” button, this Discussion Board will be added to your site content.

Step 5

Open the “Company Discussion” board. It will look similar to the below image.

Currently, the board is new and does not have any item. Let’s start the discussion.

Creating a new discussion in SharePoint Discussion Board

In order to create a new discussion, follow the below steps.

Click on the “new discussion” link.

Subject - the subject line that will be the heading of the discussion

Body - your actual discussion content. This can be of any type, like text, images, HTML tags etc. It is rich supported and of "Multiline-of-Text" column type.

Question - this checkbox indicates that you are asking something. If this is left unchecked, that means you are not asking a question but creating a general discussion.

Hit the “Save” button. Your new discussion will be added.

Responding to the discussion

Now, let’s assume that a Contoso user has logged in to the same discussion list. The user will now respond to the discussion. In order to take part in the discussion, a user has to click on the subject line of the discussion.

Once the Contoso User has clicked on the subject, he/she will see the below screen.

This screen is equipped with the following functionality.

Reply Count

The discussion will display the total number replies received.

Like

In case a user wants to like the discussion, they can like this by pressing this “Like” button.

Edit

If a user has permission to edit the post, they will see the link for “Edit”. Using this link, the user can edit the current post.

Reply

Here in this text area, a user can provide his/her feedback.

Let’s assume that the user has replied to the post.

Now here, you can see that the discussion has 1 reply and the count has got updated with 1 reply. Also, a thread has been started. Other users can like this reply or edit this reply if they have permission. There is no need to say that they can post their own reply in the given text area.

Here, the question asker or the person who has permissions can mark any of the responses as the “Best Reply” or they can just delete some or all unwanted text.

Benefits of Discussion Boards

There are many benefits for having discussion boards in your organization.

1. Using Discussion Boards, an organization can set up the personal support forum for internal organization members where the internal users can communicate to each other on a particular product or at particular point.

2. Discussion Board can be used as Social Media, like we have Facebook. Here also, the users can upload their thoughts and other users can provide their feedback.

Different Views of Discussion Boards

There are many Views available of the Discussion Boards by default, such as -

Recent

This View will always display the discussions that are created last.

My discussions

This will display the discussions created and participated in by the current logged-in user.

Unanswered questions

This will display the discussions which are asked as questions and with no replies posted so far.

Answered questions

This will display the discussions which are asked as questions and answered by the users in the community.

Featured

This will display the discussions that are marked as Featured or important. Yes, the Discussion List provides the functionality of marking a discussion as featured.

Making Discussion as Featured

In order to mark a discussion featured, we have to follow the below steps.

Open the discussions by clicking on the subject of the discussion.

Then, click on three dots and then, click on “Mark as featured”.

Once you have marked this as Featured, this will start displaying under the Featured View of the discussion boards.

Summary

In this article, we leaned what discussion boards are, how we can create a discussion board in SharePoint, and how to create a new discussion and respond to the existing discussions. Apart from this, we have also seen how we can mark any discussion as featured. If you have any questions or any suggestions related to this, do let me know in the comment section.

In the next article, I will be explaining the “Issue Tracking” list template in SharePoint.