Essential SharePoint

Discussing a Document

You can discuss a document online by selecting Discuss from the document's context menu, as shown in Figure 6-11. Doing so for a Word document opens the document in the browser and allows you to add comments in the Discussion pane at the bottom of the screen.

Comments entered as a discussion are saved when you navigate away from the document in the browser, but adding and reading items is so confusing, I'd recommend you avoid Discussions when working with Word documents. Instead, open the document in Word and use the Reviewing toolbar to enter comments and revisions.

Discussions seem better-suited for web pages (.html, .aspx). In those cases, the Discussion tags appear as Post-it? -like notes on the page as it is displayed in the browser, and it is easy to add or reply to comments in the discussion through the browser, as shown in Figure 6-13.

Discussions are maintained separately from the document library. To manage discussions in SharePoint, select Site Settings → Go to Site Administration → Manage Web Discussions.

Figure 6-13. Adding Discussion comments to a SharePoint web page