We released Blog Central (Demo Site) a little over 4 months ago and it has always been our intention to grow it into a suite of products that perform two core functions:
- Aggregate and summarise information from across your SharePoint farm.
- Extend the out-of-the-box templates with small additional features that add a lot of value.
I’m pleased to announce our first addition to the Central suite, our beta release of “Discussion Central” (Demo Site).
Discussion Central provides a “Jumping Off Point” into Discussions that are happening across your organisation. It does this by aggregating both the topics, and the replies, people are creating in Discussions Lists across your SharePoint farm. To be clear, this is cross Site Collection, cross Web Application aggregation.
Inspired by the Facebook news feed, we provide anyone accessing the portal with a quick summary of the most recent topics of discussions, and the most recent replies. It provides information on the number of views a discussion has received, and at a click, allows you to expand any topic.
At this stage we have made a single extension to the standard Discussions List, adding the ability to enable View Tracking. This provides an easy way for people to see which discussions are proving the most popular.
Anyway, a blog post can only take you so far, head over to our Discussion Central Demonstration Site and have a look for yourself. If you are interested in learning more, drop me an email daniel@zevenseas.com.