CS2: Screencast: Thread Status Tracking in Forums
In todays screencast I show you how to enable Thread Status Tracking in Community Server, and also enable it for a particular forum. Thread Status Tracking (TST) could be useful for i.e. a support forum where you want to be able to rapidly see which questions/issues are not yet solved and take action on those. Click on the picture below, or the link beneath it to watch the screencast.
Watch the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)
Also, I promised in my monday post to talk about a solution that you could make with this function together with the features that the Email Gateway (EG) brings to Community Server Forums.
A simple support system on CS with Email enabled forums and Thread Status Tracking
Let's say you want to setup a customer support service for your customer. In some scenarios there could be reasons where you don't want the customers to see each others posts. They might be giving you some info about their environment under some NDA agreement etc. You could probably do some code to make users only see their own posts in the forum, but with the solution I am talking about you don't have to write a single line of code.
In the scenario I am describing, you might decide to enable on one hand an open support forum for everyone, and an e-mail support service for paying customers. So you set up an internal CS on your intranet, install EG, and configure a forum to recieve e-mails sent to support AT mydomainname.com. Since the paying customers are registered in someway, you have created and configured accounts (enabled notifications etc) for them in the support system.
The customers sends their support requests by e-mail, which ends up in the internal support forum as a post with a Thread Status 'Unresloved'. A technician replies in the forum to the post, which then gets sent to the customer by e-mail. The customer and support tech, continues their conversation in this way until the issue is solved.
After using this system for a while it becomes a knowledge base which the technicans can search for earlier answers to questions. If tagging is used they could also find similar issues easily by navigating by tags.
If I understand the Passive Mode of the forum mailing list, you have to enable that for the above to work, since you don't want to have all replies sent to everybody, just to the one that started the thread.