Social Squared 2.7.0.0 Release

This month, we’ve released version 2.7.0.0 of the Social Squared Discussion Board app for Modern SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. There are some great refinements to improve the experience of using Social Squared as your discussion boards within the SharePoint and Teams platforms.

The refinements include:

• Microsoft Teams Channel Notifications for new posts within discussions or forums that you subscribe to.
• Auto Tagging Suggestions to improve findability and consistency of tags
• A Users Posts view to focus on the posts generated by a specific user
• Moderation Improvements (Choices for when a post should appear within a moderated forum)
• Search Result Improvements
• Pagination Improvements for Topics view
• Improved Responsive Design within the Teams mobile app.

Microsoft Teams Channel Notifications

The feature to subscribe to Topics or Forums has always been present within Social Squared. However, rather than receiving notifications of new posts, or replies to posts within an email, Social Squared can now provide that notification within a Microsoft Teams Channel banner notification or/and a Posts Feed notification. The notification will display to any user subscribed at topic or forum level. Below is a screenshot of the Banner Notification.

Below is a screenshot of the Posts Feed notification when a user creates a new post, replies to a post or creates a new topic.

It is possible to still receive the email notification if you prefer, but we feel that the Teams notifications are less intrusive than an email. If you use the Microsoft Teams mobile app, the notification will also display on your mobile phone.

Teams Channel Notifications will be turned on by default within Social Squared, but can be turned off if needed in the Social Squared settings. Channel notifications will also need to be enabled through Microsoft Teams.

Auto Tagging

Social Squared posts can be tagged (similar to a hashtag) allowing for posts to be found through the built-in Social Squared search feature or Tag Cloud view. Feedback from our customers indicated that there were inconsistencies with the tags created by Social Squared users. The inconsistencies may include typos or abbreviations. To help with this consistency, Social Squared now provides auto tag suggestions. Below is an example where ‘SharePoint’ is a tag used before within the Discussion Board for this SharePoint Site or Team. If the word ‘SharePoint’ appears in the post, Social Squared will suggest the Tag of ‘SharePoint’ to be used.

Posts tagged with such content can be found using the tag cloud view shown below:

Users Posts View

If you see a post that a user created, you may be intrigued as to what other replies or new topics that user has created. If you then decide to, you can follow that user and receive notifications that the user has created a new post. The new Users Posts view allows you to search for a specific user’s posts and view the topic if you want to read further.

Moderation Improvements

The default behaviour of Social Squared when moderators were assigned to a forum was that any new topics would require approval before the posts were displayed. This is now optional, and allows the post to be displayed immediately. The moderator will still have the ability to remove the post, move the post to another forum, or to edit the post. This setting can be set at forum level allowing for different behaviours in different forums across the forum groups.

Built-in Search Improvements

Search within Social Squared has been improved to include title, content and tags.

Microsoft Teams Mobile App

Social Squared underwent improvements to its responsive behaviour when accessed via the Microsoft Teams Mobile App. Users of the Microsoft Teams Mobile App can now access all of the features of Social Squared as a Teams Channel Tab or Personal App from their mobile phone.