We’re delighted to announce the latest release of Social Squared has been posted up yesterday evening! We managed to hit our release date of January the 18th by a couple of hours! This version has some great new features…
1, Reply via Email
We understand that one of the biggest competitors to any collaboration platform is Outlook and email. Rather than try have Social Squared compete directly against email, we now work with it rather than against it! You can now setup Social Squared so that people can reply directly to Topic and Forum email notifications. This means that people can add replies to topics from within Outlook or even on their iPhone or BlackBerry while on the move. This allows discussions to be held in a collaborative environment, and still let people reply from the device or application that they prefer to use.
2, Nicknames
In this release of Social Squared we included the ability to allow users to pick a nickname to post under, rather than their default display name within SharePoint.
This is turned off by default, so if you want to enable this functionality navigate to Site Settings -> Forum Settings within the site that is hosting Social Squared.
Within the forum settings you’ll see a value for ‘Allow Name Aliases’
Once this is set to true, your users will then be able to modify their profile and set the nickname they wish to use:
Once this is set, all the existing posts the user has made will be updated to reflect this new nickname.
3, Upload and Insert Images
In previous versions of Social Squared if you wanted to insert an image into a post you needed to already have the image hosted and know the url, or upload the image to SharePoint and then insert it knowing the local url in SharePoint. Either way, it wasn’t the best experience.
With version 3.0.0.2 of Social Squared we have extended the Insert Image functionality. Now when you click on the insert image icon in the rich text editor you will have a new Upload tab in the pop up:
Now you can click the browse button and select the image you want to use, and then click the ‘Upload’ button. This uploads the image and makes it available for you to just press the insert button and it will appear! Three or four steps are now reduced to one!
4, Target a forum group to a sub site
If you have Social Squared running with separate Forum Groups, you may want to deploy the tool to a separate subsite and display just a single Forum Group. This would allow you to have a single instance of Social Squared with different forum groups used throughout different areas of SharePoint.
It is important to note that Forum Groups should not be used as security boundaries as somebody who can edit the web parts properties could select a different Forum Group to display.
Once you have added the Social Squared Web Part to your SharePoint page you can modify the web part properties and select the forum group you wish to display
Summary
We are very excited about this release of Social Squared, especially the Reply to Email functionality as we’ve seen through our own usage how powerful this is. If you have any questions at all please send them through to contact@lightningtools.com
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