Discussions
- Introduction
- Staying Informed of Discussion Activity
- Interacting with a Discussion via email
- Creating a New Discussion
- Posting Messages to a Discussion
- Discussion Actions
- Participants
- Attaching a File to a Message
- Attaching a Discussion to a Project
- Bulk Actions
Introduction
Discussions are a great way to hold long-running online conversations about any topic you want. What you use discussions to talk about is only limited by your imagination. The screen shot below shows the "All Discussions" page, which displays all the discussions that you have access to via the workplaces that you are a member of, as well as any global discussions in your team account.
- Global discussions - These discussions are owned by a team account, and are available to all members of the account. Anyone in the team account who has the "Can create global discussions" right can create these discussions.
- Workplace discussions - These discussions are owned by a workplace, and are available only to the members of that workplace. Discussions can be added at the workplace level or to specific projects within a workplace. Any workplace member can add discussions to a workplace or project, and there is no limit to the number of discussions you can add to a workplace or project.
OnePlace provides three different ways for you to access your discussions:
- Click on the Discussions button in the toolbar at the top of the page to see a blended view of all your global and workplace discussions. You can access the global discussions owned by your team account in this view, by setting the Workplaces filter to 'None'.
- Drill into a workplace and click on the Discussions tab to view all discussions within the workplace.
- Drill into a project and click on the Discussions tab to view the discussions for that project.
Staying Informed of Discussion Activity
OnePlace monitors your discussions, and when it detects you have unread messages, will display a small maroon-colored "badge" on the Discussions button shown in the toolbar at the top of your page. This badge tells you how many discussions contain unread messages. By keeping an eye on this button, you'll always know when you have new discussion messages to read. The screenshot below shows that the user has 4 unread discussions.
If you click on the Discussions button in the global toolbar, a menu like the one shown below will appear. This menu groups your discussions into three groups - unread (discussions with new messages), recently viewed, and joined. You can also access all your discussions by clicking the "View All Your Discussions" option at the bottom of the menu.
Another way to keep tabs on your unread discussions, is to add the Discussions with New Messages panel to your Home page (see here for details on customizing your home page). Each discussion listed in this panel has unread messages (the small green badge contains the number of unread messages for each discussion). To read a discussion, just click on the title of a discussion in this panel.
Interacting with a Discussion via email
OnePlace allows you to get new discussion messages in your email inbox. If you want to post a message to the discussion you can just reply to the email. This feature is great for those that are not in OnePlace very often throughout the day but
want to stay in the loop for the discussions in which they are participating.
The email that is sent to you will look similar to the email below:
You can turn on this feature via the 'Send new discussion messages to my email' preference in your personal preferences. To learn how to set your preferences, see this section of help.
Creating a New Discussion
To create a new discussion, navigate to one of the areas where you can view discussions and click the Add button shown above the list of discussions. You need to enter a title of the discussion, along with an optional description and lists of tags. Note that you can also notify other team members of the new discussion by checking the 'Notify workplace members that a new discussion was created' option.
If you add a discussion via the Discussion mode (i.e. by clicking on the Discussions button in the toolbar at the top of the page), and you have the "Can create global discussions" permission (as assigned by the administrator of your team account), you will be able to create a global discussion that everyone in your team account can see and participate in if they chose. To create a global discussion, select the 'None' choice in the Workplaces drop down control.
Posting Messages to a Discussion
Once you've created a discussion, the next step is to start discussing something. To do this, "drill into" the discussion by clicking on its title in the list. The screen will change to the 'Discussion Details' view shown below.
Note that you can edit your last post by clicking the Pencil icon shown to the right of your name in the message heading.
Discussion messages can be filtered in one of two ways, by participant and by message date. This is a convenient way to reduce the number of messages down to what one person said, or what was said on a particular date (for example, today or yesterday). You can even apply both filters at once to see what someone said on a specific date.
You can also group messages by using the Group selector in the toolbar at the top of the view. The picture above shows the messages grouped by the date they were posted.
Discussion Actions
There are a number of actions that you can perform on a discussion:
Edit
Edit the properties of a discussion, such as its title and description.
Archive
Place the discussion in the archive for storage.
Display a printer-friendly transcript of the discussion, with the option to print the transcript.
Join/Leave
There may be times when you don't want to participate directly in a discussion (by posting messages to it), however, you do want to know when new messages have been posted to the discussion, so that you can stay informed of what's being said. The Join/Leave Discussion feature is a perfect way to do this. When you join a discussion, OnePlace will let you when there has been new activity in that discussion by bolding the discussion title, and decorating it a count of new messages you haven't seen yet. Leaving a discussion has the opposite affect - OnePlace will no longer keep you informed of new activity in that discussion.
Note that when you post a message to a discussion, you will be automatically joined to the discussion if you're not already joined.
Trash
Send the discussion to the trash.
The Email Discussion feature can be used to email the details of a discussion to someone outside of OnePlace. The email that is sent will contain all the messages which have been posted to the discussion, shown from newest to oldest. You also have the option of including a comment in the email.
Inbasket
The 'Send Discussion to Inbasket' feature is used to place a copy of the discussion in other users' inbasket.
Promote
This feature is used when you want to take a discussion and do something as a result. When you promote a discussion to a project, a new project is created (using the discussion title and description as defaults for the project's title and description), and the discussion is attached directly to the new project.
Play/Mute Alert
When a new message is posted to a discussion, and you are currently viewing the discussion, OnePlace will play a soft chime to alert you to the new message. This is especially helpful if you are in another application when OnePlace receives a new message in a discussion you are viewing in another window. You can mute (turn off) the alert by clicking the 'Mute Alert' button/link.
Participants
OnePlace provides an easy way to know the status of the people who have joined a discussion. The Participants panel shown on the right side of the view lists all people who have currently joined the discussion, along with an icon that indicates their current status:
- Active (Green Icon) - This user has posted a message to the discussion within the past minute.
- Idle (Red Icon) - This user is viewing the discussion, but hasn't posted in the past minute.
- Gone (Gray Icon) - This user is not viewing the discussion.
Attaching a File to a Message
One very useful thing about discussions is the ability to attach files to a discussion. This capability allows a team to upload files to support the conversation in the discussion. If the file you attach to a message is an image, OnePlace will automatically display the image inline in the discussion as a thumbnail, with a link to the full-sized image.
To attach a file to a discussion message, do the following:
- Click the "Attach a File" link next to the Post button in the Messages panel (where you post new messages to a discussion). A small form will slide open below the link.
- Click the 'Browse' or 'Choose File' button (depends on your browser which text is used) to select the file you want.
- Browse to the file on your hard drive that you want to attach, and click the Ok/Save button.
- Click the Post button to post your message, with a file attached to it.
Here is how the image appears within the discussion
You can see a list of all files attached to a discussion, and remove any of these files, via the Files panel. This panel is shown below the Messages panel.
Attaching a Discussion to a Project
Discussions can also be attached directly to a project. To do this, navigate to a project, click on the Discussions tab, and then click the Add button in the toolbar. The process for adding a project-specific discussion is the same as that of adding a discussion to a workplace.
Bulk Actions
You can perform bulk actions on your discussions. Simply check off the discussions you want to perform a bulk action on, and then click the Bulk Actions button and select an action to perform.
