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.
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Today on a topic that I haven't seen that much written on. There was a new whitepaper the other day on this topic, and there's been some posts about the E-mail Gateway (EG). But from what I have seen, mostly together with the blog by e-mail feature.
What I wanted to talk about in this post is what the EG brings to the Forums of Community Server.
First just a brief mention on how to e-mail enable a forum. After you correctly have installed the EG and installed the license for it, there is a new TAB in the forums settings called 'Mailing List'. In CS 2.0 you get there by Control Panel -> Administration -> Forums -> Forums -> Click on the forum name -> Choose the 'Mailing List' TAB.
On that TAB you should see this:
To enable e-mail for the forum click in 'Yes', provide a name for the mailing list which will show up in mails sent from that forum, and also type in an e-mail address that you want the forum to have. You can also set a Footer that will be sent in each e-mail coming from that forum. I won't go into the passive mode in this post. If you want to know more about that let me know.
After these actions your forum is e-mail enabled, and when you now go into that forum you will se an 'Email Available' image in the lower right of the forum page.
When you click that image (not the one above in this post if you tried that) it will take you to the E-mail Subscriptions page for that forum.
If you check the checkbox on that page, and then click on save, you will get all new posts in that forum to the e-mail address that you registered at the forum with.
But that's far from all. You can now also e-mail your posts to that forum, as long as you send the e-mails from your registered e-mail address to the address you created on the 'Mailing List' TAB above. For example you can start a new thread by just sending an e-mail. Or you can reply to an e-mail notification you got from that forum, and it will show up as an answer in the respective thread.
IMO, this is a a great feature of CS 2.0, on which you also could easily build upon for different purposes. On friday I will try to give you an example of a solution that could be made on top of this feature together with another CS feature without writing any code.
See there, I made a cliff hanger! Now you just have to read my post on friday, and you won't be able to sleep for the whole week ;-)
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