Discussion Board Workflow for Replies

Question

I have a Discussion Board on my SharePoint site that is used by the whole organization for weekly department updates. Usually what happens is:

1. Department will post their weekly update as a new discussion item
2. Users from other departments will go and reply to the discussion
3. Author will "mention" their names in their reply (@Name just to direct comments)

I already have a designer workflow on the list that will email the Created By whenever there is a new reply on their discussion item, but what I want to do is have the workflow email everyone who has replied to the discussion post. Any ways to do that?

Answer 1

I did something similar. I added a field to the discussion list called CC - and every time I got a reply, I added that user to the CC field in the parent.. That gave me a place to keep track of everyone - it was designed in 2010 so I didn't have the luxury of looping through replies. You can get the parent by the ParentFolderId in the reply.

For example, to get the creator of the parent, you can do a lookup to the current list, and grab the 'Created By' field, and find the list item by using field ID with value Current Item:Parent Folder Id

Then use the same logic to update the parent message with the new cc values.