This is an overview video of Social Squared Discussion Boards for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. The video acts as an introduction to Social Squared. Subsequent videos will be in more depth covering the creation of Forum Groups and Forums, Social Squared Settings, Moderation, Creating and responding to Topics, and Searching for content.
Getting Started
Now that you have Social Squared installed, we’ll look at using Social Squared within Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams Tabs, Microsoft Teams Personal Apps, and as a mobile phone app.
Within SharePoint Online, we’ll understand the structure of Social Squared, and how to configure new Forum Groups and Forums. We’ll then discover the high level features such as posting topics, replying to topics, inserting pictures into posts, tagging posts, searching posts, and an overview of the Social Squared settings.
The Social Squared Discussion Board Structure
Social Squared posts are organized into topics, forums and forum groups. This structure enables users to navigate to relevant content when researching answers to questions, posting a question to the correct audience, or moderating posts. Rather than a social feed that is continuous, Social Squared topics are created within a forum so that posts with a similar subject are grouped. This structure can be found in many internet based forums. Take for example discussion boards related to baking. Forum Groups could be Cakes or Bread. The Cakes Forum Group could have many Forums such as Cupcakes, and Birthday Cakes. While the Bread Forum Group could contain Bread Rolls, Sourdough, and Wheat Bread. If you had a topic such as a baking question or a new recipe, you would navigate to the appropriate forum so that users could find your topic and reply to it. A topic such as “How to make a sourdough starter” would be posted under Sourdough -> Bread.
Social Squared has many uses such as Community of Practice, Technical Discussion Boards, Class Discussions, Brainstorming and much more. So the structure would be up to you. In the below example, you can see how Social Squared could be structured for a Human Resources Discussion Board.
Social Squared can also be displayed within Microsoft Teams as a Channel Tab. It’s not a choice of one or the other, you could add Social Squared to a Team, and also to the underlying SharePoint site. They will both share the same content allowing your users to engage in discussions through their favourite platform.
In the next video, we’ll take a look at navigating Social Squared. If you are a Site or Teams Owner, you can navigate straight to our configuring Social Squared section.
