ocial Squared is a SharePoint discussion board application where users can post questions within relevant forums and receive answers to their questions from subject matter experts. The discussions continue to provide answers to commonly asked questions to other employees who may be looking for information. The structure of Social Squared forums means that users can easily find answers to questions through logical forum structures, tags, and built in search. Features such as Mark as Answer provide business users with confidence when reading posts.
Social Squared can be easily configured within SharePoint Sites or Microsoft Teams. Forum Groups can be defined as a parent category to the Forums which makes finding posts through navigation (even if the post was made some time ago) easy to find. Posts can also be found easily through Social Squared’s own search feature as well as through the built in Tag Cloud.
Discussion Forums can be created for a variety of different reasons. In this example we have created a Forum Group for the Microsoft 365 technologies such as Teams, Planner, and SharePoint. Forums are then created within the Forum Groups for more specific discussions. Under the SharePoint Forum Group, you will see a Forum for SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online. Anyone looking to ask a question regarding SharePoint 2019 for example would be able to post their question under SharePoint On-Premises rather than SharePoint Online. This also allows subject matter experts to focus more on the questions that they can respond to and provide value.
When you navigate into a forum, you’ll be able to see the topics and discussions that are taking place. Any new topics that you have not read before will be highlighted. You’ll see whether topics have been answered, their average ratings, how many views and posts are within the topic, and also the ability to subscribe to the forum if you want to be notified of new posts within this forum.
Reading Discussions and Providing Feedback
Social Squared offers a threaded discussion view with the ability to provide feedback to other users.
Posts can be rated, voted upon, or liked by users in order to give feedback to the user creating or responding to a post. Additionally, replies can be marked as answered or marked as featured, which gives readers of forums assurance that the response they are reading is validated to be the correct answer.
Users also receive feedback through the earning of badges. The more you post, mark posts as answered, the more points you are rewarded. This makes it easy to spot subject matter experts within your business.
Suggested Tags
Social Squared provides a rich text editor for creating and replying to topics. The Rich Text toolbar provides functionality such as inserting images, YouTube videos, Stream Videos, Formatted Code Inserts, as well as font formatting.
As you type, suggestions on how you might tag your post appear. Selecting an existing tag will provide consistency in the tags used making it easier for other users to discover your post.
Social Squared Tag Cloud View
The Social Squared Tag Cloud view makes it easy to navigate to posts within a specific category even if they span multiple forums. The more a tag appears in different posts, the more prominent it will be in the tag cloud. Users can navigate to posts with the tag in one click.
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Social Squared is both modern and responsive. When you use the SharePoint App or Teams App by Microsoft, you’ll be able to use the full rich features of Social Squared on your phone thanks to the responsive design.
