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.
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.
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
| Feature | Social Squared | SharePoint Discussion List |
|---|---|---|
| Data Store | SQL Database | SharePoint List |
| Forum Notifications (Alerts) |  | |
| Localization Support | | |
| Post voting | |  |
| Mark post as answer | | |
| Topic Rating | | |
| RSS Feed | | |
| Lock Topics | | |
| Sticky Topics | | |
| Tagging – Custom | | |
| Move topics between forums | | |
| Archive to separate Knowledgebase | | |
| Featured Posts | | |
| See followers | | |
| Post Attachments | Multiple | Multiple |
| Post sorting | | |
| Code syntax highlighting | | |
| Reply via Email | | |
| Create Topic via Email | | |
| Customizable CSS, Images and ASCX controls | | |
| Tagging – Metadata Term Store | | |
| Reports | | |
| User Reputation \ Gamification | | |
| Reply with quote | | |
| Report Abuse functionality | | |
| Alias \ Nickname support | | |
| Right to Left language support | | |
| Forum Groups | | |
| Integrated Search | | |
| BCS Search | | N/A |
| Follow users | | |
| Email subscription management | | |
| Featured Posts | | |
| Customizable Email template | | Requires Development |
| Notification Digest | | |
| MySite Profile integration | | |
| Enforce Terms and Conditions | | |
| Anonymous Access | | |
| Active User Web Part | | |
| Tag Cloud Web Part | | |
| Recent Activity view | | |
| Attachment restriction settings | | |
| Email subject filtering | | |
| Accessibility Support | | |
| Original Post \ Moderator easy identification | | |
| Phone App (iPhone and Android) | | |
