Participate in a discussion board

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About discussion boards

Discussion boards provide a forum for conversing about topics that interest your team. For example, you could create a discussion board for team members to suggest activities.

Each discussion board appears on a page that includes commands for starting new discussions, sorting and filtering discussions, switching to a different view of the discussion board, and changing the design of the discussion board. You can also subscribe to be notified of changes to the discussion board from the page that displays the discussion board.

When you reply to a comment on the discussion board, your response is indented underneath the comment you replied to.

By default, your SharePoint team Web site comes with a built-in discussion board named General Discussion, which is listed on the Quick Launch bar as well as on the Discussion Boards page.

About discussing documents

The Discussion Boards page also provides an entry point for using Web Discussions, a feature that enables you to add discussion comments to pages that you view in your browser.

If you are running Microsoft Office XP or later and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, you can use the Web Discussions toolbar in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Otherwise, you can use the Discussion Boards page in your team Web site to use this feature.

  1. On the top link bar, click Discussion Boards.

  2. On the Discussion Boards page, click the name of the board you want to participate in.

  3. Do one of the following:

    Start a new discussion

    1. Click New Discussion.

    2. In the Subject box, type a title for your comment. This field is required.

    3. In the Text box, type your comment.

    4. If you want to save the comment to the discussion board, click Save and Close.

      If you want to cancel creating the comment, click Go back to discussion board.

    Reply to an existing comment

    1. In the Subject column, click a discussion comment.

    2. Click Reply.

    3. In the Text box, type your comment.

    4. If you want to save the comment to the discussion board, click Save and Close.

      If you want to cancel creating the comment, click Go back to discussion board.

    Edit or delete your own discussion comment

    1. In the Subject column, click your discussion comment.

    2. Do one of the following:

      • To edit the comment, click Edit Item. Modify the comment, and click Save and Close.

      • To delete the item, click Delete Item.