Social Squared for SharePoint 2013 – 2016

Social Squared is a SharePoint Discussion Forum Tool that empowers business users to post questions, raise ideas, and build knowledge bases within SharePoint Sites.

Core Features

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ocial Squared encourages users to engage in discussions with their co-workers across the organization whilst using SharePoint as the platform. Users will find it intuitive to post questions and receive answers by subject matter experts that benefit everyone with access to the forums. Through moderation, and giving feedback through ratings, voting, and likes, your users will experience a useful knowledge base centred on your organization and created by your employees contributions.

Topic Discussions

When you have a burning question, it’s tempting to interrupt a co-worker or send an email to get the answer. Who benefits? Just the person who asked the question. Posting a question in a discussion forum that’s organized by subject, tagged, and discovered easily will benefit everyone in the organization. 

Feedback to Your Questions

Everyone likes their questions to be answered. With Social Squared, answers are verified by other users through Mark as Answer, Mark as Featured, Votings, Ratings, and Likes. Anyone with a similar question that discoverers the answer will be confident that they found what they are looking for.

Discussion Forums in SharePoint and Mobile Devices

Social Squared forums can be created at site level, but also replicated across many sites for organization wide discussions. Mobile users will also benefit from engagement in the forums via IOS or Android Social Squared phone apps.

Video: Adding posts, Replying to Posts and Configuring the Social Squared web part

Within this 9 minute video, we explore the features of the Social Squared web part. Demonstrating the multiple forum groups, how to create a post, and then use many of the features such as voting, and gamification. We then explore the features and how to enable or disable the functionality for each forum. We also explore the other web parts such as Recent Posts, Most popular user, and the Tag cloud web part.

Multiple Forum Groups

Social Squared is a SharePoint hosted forum solution offering large enterprise organizations a powerful and scalable forum solution. Users of Social Squared benefit from a well structured discussion thread along with the features that they require from a forum solution such as ratings, Mark as Answered, Featured Posts, Forum Moderation, Post via Email + many more features.

Forum groups are easily created by SharePoint Site Administrators allowing each forum group to be tailored to your business requirements. Within the forum group settings, moderators can be set, voting, ratings, badges, and newsfeed integration can be configured.

Profiles, Badges and Gamification

Social Squared provides two modes for user profiles. Social Squared can maintain user profiles for users who perhaps disable My Site functionality or don’t have My Sites available. Alternatively, Social Squared can work with your SharePoint User Profile allowing users to manage their signatures, ‘Ask me About’ and profile pictures through their My Site Settings. In addition, Social Squared users can follow other users allowing posts that they have posted to their Newsfeeds to be available to their followers.

The optional private messaging functionality enables Social Squared users to enter private conversations about work topics.

As you post and reply to topics, you will also earn rewards in the form of badges which are shown on your profile. Another Social Squared web part which can be added to the same page, also shows the most frequent posters within a particular forum group which encourages user participation.

Create Posts with full rich text, tagging, Attach files

When adding a new post, users benefit from Rich Text functionality which enables them to properly format their content, add images, videos and emoticons. Attachments can be added either from a file system, url or SharePoint document library.

While posting a new topic, users can also tag their content using the out of the box Managed Meta Data Term Store or Social Squared’s own tag cloud web part.

Subscriptions to posts that you create allow you to be kept in the look when replies to your post are received. You may also subscribe other users to posts that you think they may be interested in.

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Case Study Learn How Severn Trent Water Use Social Squared

Severn Trent Water is based in the Midlands, England and is one of ten regional water and waste authorities in Britain. It’s responsible for water supply management, and wastewater treatment and disposal.

Ratings, Voting, Make Sticky

When clicking on a forum group, summary information will be shown for each topic. This includes the number of views, replies, rating, and details of the last post.

Further reports can be run on Social Squared showing the number of topics created over a specific interval.

Comparison of Social Squared vs. SharePoint Discussion Board

FeatureSocial SquaredSharePoint Discussion List
Data StoreSQL DatabaseSharePoint List
Forum Notifications (Alerts)CheckCheck
Localization SupportCheckCheck
Post votingCheckCross
Mark post as answerCheckCheck
Topic RatingCheckCheck
RSS FeedCheckCheck
Lock TopicsCheckCross
Sticky TopicsCheckCross
Tagging – CustomCheckCheck
Move topics between forumsCheckCross
Archive to separate KnowledgebaseCrossCross
Featured PostsCheckCheck
See followersCheckCheck
Post AttachmentsMultipleMultiple
Post sortingCheckCheck
Code syntax highlightingCheckCross
Reply via EmailCheckCross
Create Topic via EmailCheckCheck
Customizable CSS, Images and ASCX controlsCheckCross
Tagging – Metadata Term StoreCheckCheck
ReportsCheckCross
User Reputation \ GamificationCheckCheck
Reply with quoteCheckCross
Report Abuse functionalityCheckCross
Alias \ Nickname supportCheckCross
Right to Left language supportCheckCheck
Forum GroupsCheckCross
Integrated SearchCheckCheck
BCS SearchCheckN/A
Follow usersCheckCheck
Email subscription managementCheckCheck
Featured PostsCheckCheck
Customizable Email templateCheckRequires Development
Notification DigestCheckCheck
MySite Profile integrationCheckCheck
Enforce Terms and ConditionsCheckCross
Anonymous AccessCheckCheck
Active User Web PartCheckCross
Tag Cloud Web PartCheckCross
Recent Activity viewCheckCheck
Attachment restriction settingsCheckCross
Email subject filteringCheckCross
Accessibility SupportCheckCheck
Original Post \ Moderator easy identificationCheckCross
Phone App (iPhone and Android)CheckCross
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