Mark a Discussion board message as “Accepted Solution”

Question

In MOSS 2007 discussion boards, is it possible to mark a message as "Accepted Solution"? This shall be done by the site admin or the query initiator.

Answer 1

Lightning Tools has a Discussion board that does this and so does Quest I believe. If buying a thrid party discussion board tool is not an option, you should be able to create a new column (Choice or Yes/No) and use that as an accepted solution function. It wouldn't let you specify what the accepted reply was, but that the question has been answered.

Answer 2

The Out-of-the-box SharePoint discussion board cannot do that. There are solutions out there that extend the capabilities of SharePoint discussion board, but I dont know one that delivers a "Accept Answer" feature.

Answer 3

I'm actually working on this now and this is my planned strategy:

• Since any workflow has a dynamic initiation page ([Site]/Workflows/[Workflow]/[Workflow].aspx?List=[List ID]&ID=[Item ID]), you send an e-mail to the thread starter anytime a reply is posted with the body of the reply and a link to that workflow.
• Add a manually-initiated workflow with initiation parameters to ask whether the solution is acceptable (just yes/no).
• Messages include a column called "Parent Title" so you can use that to have the workflow write to the initial post with some kind of status update.
• Update the message/reply item with a status and have your view sorting such that accepted answers show up first.

I may lose the function of having someone's picture in the thread since SP likes to replace the discussion created by image with the modified by image for no good reason but I figure having answers outweighs pretty pictures.