One of the things that I’ve had to dance around with Notes to SharePoint migrations (Steve Walch talks about this in Search of a better Discussion…) and even with SharePoint as a community platform for forums, is the challenged discussion list.  Many people I’ve talked to thought the discussion lists got worse going from 2003 to 2007 and upgrade with some depreciated features was a struggle.  If you are looking to enhance your discussion list, this is a great free alternative that enhances the existing discussion list. I don’t think it’s necessary to bash SharePoint to push a solution, but I do want people to know there are gaps and I’m excited to see the gaps filled.

I’ve been looking for the community to put something together for a couple of years.  There was a codeplex project that was put together and apparently dropped as people got busy.  Note the 1 1/2 star for the project that has no code with status as no yet defined!

I’m excited to see Quest showing off its colors and providing a free no strings attached Discussion View with collapsible threaded views and a whole lot more.  Here’s a small screenshot of the discussion view with dummy data.

Note: “This WebPart leverages the existing discussion boards, so an empty discussion board has to be added first. You can also connect this webpart to an existing discussion board.”

The install is an .msi package that you’d run to install to the farm.  You should definitely try this in a non production environment first. (Update: I’m working with Quest to provide a WSP alternative.)

See the web part in action in a video demo by Curtis Kelly.

A few of the features include:

1. Cross List display! You can view multiple discussion lists at once by specifying them in the Viewed Lists property. The lists that you view can reside in another site, another site collection or even another web application as long as they are in the same configuration database.

2. UI enhancements: It displays the discussions and their responses in a tree structure, making it much easier to find the relevant topic

3. Time Saver: A preview panel to view the content of the selected discussion or response quickly.

4. Customizable UI: The ability to select which field to be displayed in the tree view panel by using the Display Fields property. If not defined, only the Subject field will be displayed.

5. Extensible: The developer enhancement ability to filter the top level discussions by using CAML Filter  expression.

6. Branding & Look and Feel: Allows you to customize the look and feel by using Skins.

7. Grouping: The ability to group the discussions by a specific field. For example, if your discussion list contains a Category field, you can group the discussions based on that field. This greatly enhances usability.

You can download the bits – FREE from SharePointForAll.com the Quest SharePoint Team Community site:

32-bit qDiscussion View (For WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007)

64-bit qDiscussion View (For WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) 

Provide feedback and get support through the qDiscussion Board forum.

If you like this design, you’d be pleased with the other webparts that are designed to help you build composite applications on SharePoint, right through the web UI. This functionality comes out of a set of Quest Webparts.  Watch a Webparts demo or download the Quest WebParts trial.  Now available in Starter Bundle, Starter Bundle Plus, SI Bundle for Databases, Full Package