You’ve probably heard the sayings, “Written once, read many times,” and “Speak once, listen many times” before, right? In today’s organizations, teams are often located in different locations, and even in different time zones. With organizational challenges such as these, the ability to provide the correct answers to user’s questions empowering them with reliable findability is critical. SharePoint out-of-the-box provides users with the Discussion Board for organizations and teams to collaborate. Bamboo adds some critical features to the Discussion Board to improve findability via sticky, verify the answer, rating, view counts, etc., as introduced in Discussion Board Plus in 2011 for SharePoint 2010. I’m pleased to announce today that Discussion Board Plus 1.5 for SharePoint 2013 is now available.

New Features:

• Support SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013.
• Supports Forms-based Authentication (FBA) in SharePoint 2013 for both intranet and extranet.
• Create new topics, reply to posts and edit posts like familiar out-of-the-box SharePoint Discussion Boards.
• Easy-to-use Forum view with topics classified as importance, date, and status.
• Identify the status of topics at a glance with distinctive icons.
• Suggest and Verify correct answers for discussion topics.
• Raise the importance of a topic moving it to the top of the Discussion Board Plus topic list with Mark as Sticky.
• Lock a topic to prevent further posts to a Discussion Board Plus thread.
• Display a count of the number of topic views, including views from anonymous users.
• Conveniently access settings and topic moderation feature in the SharePoint 2013 Ribbon.
• Three view options for discussion threads:
  • Flat view
  • Threaded view
  • Append view
• Migrate existing SharePoint Discussion Boards to Discussion Board Plus.
• Includes all the features of the Bamboo Rating Column to allow topic and post ratings.
• Includes all the features of Bamboo List Search Simple Web Part to easily search discussion threats for relevant content.
• Works with Alert Plus and Bamboo SharePoint Project Management Central (sold separately).
• Option to Automatically subscribe authors to email alerts on their forum topics.
• Inserting and playing videos in the forum topics and forum posts using the following methods:
  • Embedding a video from shared video sites such as YouTube or Bamboo Video Library into a post using IFrame embed code.
  • Uploading a video (using Bamboo Video Library, which is sold separately)
  • Linking to a video (using Bamboo Video Library, which is sold separately)
  • Selecting a video from Bamboo Video Library (using Bamboo Video Library, which is sold separately)

Download a free trial of Discussion Board Plus for SharePoint for 30 days, and see what it can do for your organization. If you have existing out-of-the-box SharePoint Discussion Boards and you’d like to leverage the additional features of Discussion Board Plus on those Boards, you can easily do so via the migration tool that comes bundled with Discussion Board Plus.