Lightning Storm SharePoint Forums

SharePoint Forums – Anonymous Posting

Lightning Tools — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:25:44 GMT

Yesterday we put out a new release of Social Squared – version 1.0.0.6 – our enterprise forum solution for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

The main new feature included in this release is the ability to allow people to anonymously post new topics in an individual forum. This has a few settings so is very configurable:

Authenticated Users

Some organizations want to allow users who are authenticated into SharePoint to post anonymously. A good scenario for this is a company feedback forum where the organization wants to get honest feedback from employees. The feedback may be deemed better if employees can leave the comments completely anonymously.

There are a few settings when allowing authenticated users to post anonymously:

Can create topics – allow authenticated users to anonymously create new topics

Can create replies – allow authenticated users to anonymously create replies to existing topics

Require name – if set a textbox asks the user to enter a name when posting anonymously

Require email – if set a textbox asks the user to enter an email address when posting anonymously

Anonymous Users

If you are running a public facing web site then it is unlikely that everyone that visits the site will be authenticated. Social Squared also allows anonymous visitors to post anonymous topics or replies to forums that are setup for this.

The settings are the same as above, so you can set whether these anonymous users can create new topics, or just post replies to existing ones – and also if they are required to enter a name and email address when posting.

Try it out…

We’ve enabled the Test Forum in Social Squared to allow anonymous users to create new topics and replies, you can try it out here:

http://connect.lightningtools.com/default.aspx?action=ViewTopics&fid=7

Download…

You can download a fully functional trial of Social Squared to try out this functionality from here:

Social Squared Download Page.

Coming tomorrow…

In the previous release we added the ability to set where the forums would look up the CSS, image, and user control files it uses to render itself. Tomorrow we’ll be releasing a new UI package that changes the look of the forums so it looks great in SharePoint 2010! It is also a great example of how to customize and deploy a custom look and feel for Social Squared.

Social Squared 1.0.0.2 release

Lightning Tools — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:08:17 GMT

Now that we have the initial version of Social Squared released – our 2nd SharePoint Forum Web Part tool – we’ll be iterating quite quickly adding new features and improvements based on our own findings of using the forums on our own Discussion Site and from people using the forums on their own SharePoint sites. We’ve just pushed out a new release that has the following improvements:

Forum Settings Page

Linked from the site settings page, the Forums Settings page will allow you to customize how the forums look and work:

At the moment we have 2 settings:

1, Show profile picture – this setting decides if user profile pictures are displayed next to users posts.

2, Show email addresses – if you are running your forum on a public web site you may not want to display your users email addresses.

We’ll certainly be adding more configuration settings in future releases.

Please give the forums a try over on our Connect Site, or download the free trial to deploy it to your own SharePoint environment.

<nick/>

Check out Social Squared

Lightning Tools — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:11:29 GMT

We have been really happy with how the Lightning Storm Forums has been doing. We get emails from people every day who are happy to find something for SharePoint that looks and work likes a normal forum does on the internet. SharePoint does have Discussion Boards available to use – but they do look and feel slightly different to standard forum type tools.

The Lightning Storm Forums use a number of SharePoint lists as storage for topics, posts and user information. While these lists can scale to store hundreds of thousands of items – the more you put in them and the harder you try to process the data in the lists the slower things get. People have been asking for more advanced forum features such as :

- post/topic moderation

- indication of new posts since your last visit

- better forum and user stats

plus many more.

We didn’t feel comfortable adding this functionality to the Lightning Storm Forums as it would lead to a slow down in performance – which is something nobody wants. So we’ve decided to build another forum tool called Social Squared. Social Squared directly uses Microsoft SQL Server for storage which gives us a lot more power in what we can do with the features.

Here is how to decide which forum web part is best for you:

Lightning Storm Forums

You require team based communication

General forum features

Storage part of a SharePoint site

Social Squared

You require a company-wide discussion platform

Advanced forum features

Happy to have separate storage database

You can find more information out about both of our SharePoint Community Tools here.

Try them now…

We are a big believer in building products that we use ourselves, and therefore have setup our Lightning Tools Connect site to be our main proving ground for the forums. This means you can try the forums out without having to install anything yourself!

We of course have a trial version of the forums available for download which you can get from here:

Social Squared Forums Download.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting about some of the features we’ve built into Social Squared.

Please give the forums a try, and let us know your feedback.

<nick/>

Move Forum Topics – Lightning Storm Forums

Lightning Tools — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:34:31 GMT

One of the features that wasn’t in the initial version of our SharePoint Forums product was the ability to move topics between forums. You know the scenario – Bob creates a new topic about Football (or Soccer for our American friends) in the Motor Racing forum category. Up until now you would have had to have deleted Bobs topic and asked him to create it again – but if you download version 1.0.0.16 of the Lightning Storm Forums you’ll see a new action icon when looking at a topic:

Clicking on this image will allow you to select a new forum for the topic to live in:

Bob will be happy, and so will the forum managers.

This is one of the bits of functionality we knew we’d have to implement – and it’s now something we can tick off! You can get the new version of the Lightning Storm Forums by visiting the link below:

SharePoint Forums

<nick/>

Lightning Storm Forum Alerts

Lightning Tools — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:19:33 GMT

We’ve had a number of support questions recently around how users of the Lightning Storm Forums can get email alerts when new topics or replies are added that they may be interested in. Here are the 3 ways users can sign up for alerts.

1, Sign up for an entire forum

If you want to receive an alert whenever a new topic or reply is added to a particular forum, when viewing the topics within the forum click on the Email Notification icon that is in the top right of the web part.

When you have done that you’ll get an email alert whenever someone adds a new topic or reply to the forum

2, Sign up for a particular topic

If you are viewing a topic that you are interested in, at the top of the web part you’ll see the Email Notification icon. Click on this and you’ll start getting email alerts whenever someone adds a new post to this topic.

3, Sign up for a topic when creating a reply

If you are creating a new topic or adding a reply to an existing topic – there is a checkbox that allows you to sign up for notifications. If you check this and hit the Post button, you’ll then get alerts when a new reply is added to that topic.

Hope that helps explain how your users can sign up to email notifications within the Storm Forums. If you have any questions or feedback/ideas please send them over to support@lightningtools.com

<nick/>

SharePoint Forums in SharePoint 2010

Lightning Tools — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:28:18 GMT

Thankfully when we were building the Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint we stuck to web part and solution best practises, so getting the forums to work in SharePoint 2010 has been relatively easy! We needed to make a couple of CSS changes due to the new style sheets, but other than that the web part deploys and works great in SharePoint 2010. Great news if you are looking to upgrade or deploy the Storm Forums in 2010.

[click image for a larger view]

You’ll need to make sure you get the version we released today (1.0.0.15) which has the new CSS changes. You can get this from the Downloads page if you are an existing customer, or the Storm Forums homepage if you’d like to get your hands on the trial version of the web part.

Lightning Storm Forums release 1.0.0.14

Lightning Tools — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:43:26 GMT

Isn’t it funny how requirements are like London buses and always come along 3 at a time. The Storm Forums have been out for around 18 months now and from original release users needed to have Contributor site permissions or above to be able to create new topics and replies. This seemed good to us as we envisioned the forums being used mostly in collaboration environments. We use 7 lists for the forums – most of which are hidden, so we decided to use permissions at the Site level rather than having to set them at 7 different places.

All was good until around 2 months ago we had 4 different companies come to us and say they wanted users with Read-Only site permissions to be able to create new replies + topics. When 1 person suggests a feature you take note, but when 3 or 4 mention it in such a brief period of time you understand it is something worth implementing – so that is what we have done.

If you download the latest version of the forums in the web part toolbar properties you’ll notice two new checkboxes:

Now you can choose exactly what Read Only site users can do. You can decide if you want them to be creating new topics, or just replying to existing ones.

If you are an existing customer you can get the new version from the Downloads page after logging in, or pick up the trial from the Storm Forums homepage.

Let us know your feedback once you’ve tried it, and remember if you have an idea make sure you shout it over to us :-)

<nick/>

Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint – Feb 2010 release

Lightning Tools — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:43:31 GMT

We’ve just uploaded a new release of the Lightning Storm Forums. This has a couple of new features that have come directly from customer feedback:

Easier to delete topics

If you have the permissions to do so, you can now delete topics directly from within the topic view:

Previously you had to go into the forum management screens to delete an entire topic – now it is much easier.

Easier to sign up to alerts

When you create a new topic or reply you’ll have a checkbox that can allow you to sign up to be alerted of new posts:

Much easier now to setup alerts for topics you are interested in

Performance information available

If you think your forums are a little slow in loading, you can now select the option in the web part properties to see Debug Timing information

When viewing a topic, at the bottom you’ll now see information about how long each method call is taking. This makes it much easier for us to support you if you do have any performance problems.

You can download a Free Trial of the Lightning Storm Forums from it’s home page:

Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint

If you are an existing customer login to the site and checkout the downloads area.

Lightning Storm Forums 1.0.0.12

Lightning Tools — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:49:33 GMT

We are delighted to announce we’ve just pushed out version 1.0.0.12 of Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint.

Here’s a quick overview of the updates:

- allow authenticated users to post anonymously

- subscribe to alerts for a whole forum

- performance improvements around rendering

You can get a trial download of the web part from here, or if you are an existing customer check out the downloads page once you login.

Here’s a bit more information about the new features:

Allow Authenticated Users to Post Anonymously

This certainly is a feature we were not sure about, however we had enough requests for it that we knew we had to implement it. The scenario is based around a company wanting to get anonymous feedback from employees through their SharePoint site. Most SharePoint sites are using active directory to save their users having to login each time and have anonymous access switched off. Of course not everybody wants people to be able to post anonymously so it has been implemented as something that needs to be switched on.

1, Put the page into edit mode and bring up the web part toolbar for the forums. You’ll see an option for ‘Allow authenticated users to post anonymously’ – tick this:

2, Save the settings –> now when you go to create a new topic or reply, before the Post button you’ll see a checkbox to post anonymously. If you check this then there will be no username saved against the post

If this isn’t ticked then the users name will be posted.

Subscribe to alerts for a whole forum

You could previously subscribe to individual topics to get email alerts when a new reply was made. We’ve also added the ability to subscribe to an entire forum, so when you are viewing all the topics within a forum you can see the new subscribe button

Performance Improvements

We have been happy with how the web part performs under testing but we always keen to get things faster. We’ve tested it with thousands of topics with thousands of replies and it was working well, but we were using the ASP.NET 3.5 listview and databound events. We knew the databound events would be expensive so now we are getting all the data we need to display in one go and rendering out the html all in one go. We’ve seen a 50% improvement in performance which we hope you will enjoy!

SharePoint Forum Knowledge Base Feature released

Lightning Tools — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:12:25 GMT

On Thursday last week we posted the new version of the Lightning Storm Forums that contain the Knowledge Base functionality we previewed here.

We’ve recorded a short screen cast to show the knowledge base in action here:

We also added some new functionality and fixes:

Tagging is no longer case sensitive
Rich Text box now has immediate focus upon replying to a topic
Sticky topic icon changed

You can download a free trial of the web part from the here.