hello again today I'd like to talk about how you use Weaver instead of email to hold a discussion with others so imagine this situation where you've been using email for a discussion generally the way this works is our message comes in you do reply all to all the people on the - or the carbon copy the email messages if you're using a good email clients will group messages by subject lines so kind of the messages kind of stay together when you do a reply to the email message it generally carries a complete copy of the message that's being replied to so all the so that all the messages are in there and you add your new comments at the top but there's a number of problems with that often the topics changed without changing the subject lines so this means that you'll have a bunch of messages from a bunch of different topics all mixed together or group together or the opposite problem can happen is that you change the subject line and you haven't changed the topic so now these messages are now being grouped with different messages and you get a couple different things bigger problems are that people who join the discussion late never get a chance to see the old messages well they'll see some of them tailing off down at the bottom of the of the current message but it's really hard to to unwind that it's very hard for anybody to jump in in the middle of the stream and searching for particular topics if something happened in one message if it happened a long time ago you're gonna have a whole bunch of copies of that message so you know you'll find potentially lots of false hits or parts of the messages or things like that it becomes very difficult in this big file that comes along also very difficult to print out each of the messages tends to be very very long not very organized people don't always reply the latest message so that means that the trail of messages that you down below won't won't be always the most accurate and you end up with a mailbox full of mail and each message is really really long and that's very difficult to manage this on a mobile device and the other thing is that by its very nature if you send an email with a typo in it you can't go back and correct it I'd like to propose there's a better way to do this and that is that you go to a workspace and you create a discussion topic and as you create the discussion topic um email notification goes out so you put comments in this discussion topic in each comment goes out there's an email message the message itself has a reply to button to make it really really easy to comment back but in the end you end up with all the comments in one place new subscribers that come to it can see all of the comments there's one comment per thing it's it's a standard discussion forum capability and of course people can unsubscribe any time if they want to remove themselves the group that's another problem with the email which it all depends on you being sent a message so if people don't stop sending you the message they won't stop war with the unsubscribe you can pull yourself out at any time so that's what I'll demonstrate here's a typical Weaver site and let's just say that you have a workspace called discussion group and you would go to the topics the first thing you would do when you want to hold a discussion on particular topic is create a new topic so the topic they should we replace the roof introduce the topic briefly and send it out so if we go look in the email this email message comes out saying should we replace the roof so this is the this is how the group gets introduced to it and this one's received by by Betty so what I'm gonna do quickly before I respond to this let me go back and let me log out want to comment on it there's this action link called make a comment so if you go there you now have a place to put a comment so let's say that Betty's got a couple of things to say about about this idea and so she composes this her message here now as she can save a draft I'll come back to it later if she's not done with it but let's just go ahead and send it like that let's go back and look at the email we now see that a email has come in saying giving giving you know her new comment and again you've got got a reply button so once again if you hit the reply and so people can hit a reply here's the if I if I save the draft and then go away I go back to my email whatever I do something else if I go back and say reply to this again and come back and you know what you've sort of typed in there as a reply is there so we're go ahead and send that and here's the second comment this is the user interface for very quick responses you can see what else has been going on in the discussion thread here you see the discretion you see the people that are subscribed to it if you want to subscribe yourself to the message you can put yourself in as an example here as well and you can see who has made contributions to it now we've been using this sort of quick reply feature which just allows you to enter in a reply very quickly and and I think it's very easy to use there's a lot more capabilities if you want to and and to see that you go to the full discussion of course now to do that we need to log in so you have a login you know with the standard you know just set up your own password it's it's with your own email so here now you're seeing the full discussion and here you have a number of additional capabilities if you want to go beyond just a sort of a quick reply clearly you can you can make a comment here and then here you can do things like you can add attachments you can also add people to the discussion here so just by putting their email address in like that and you can put a number of them well let's say you put that in there it puts a little box around there so you can now type another name in you can either type as many as you need to so that now adds them to the discussion if we then say save and post it you will now you've again another email message will be sent let's take a look at what that looks like so now we have a message that goes to to Dave and again if if if I was to go back here and log out then for example if dave received this message you know Dave can just click on this and we'll see that this is a comment from Dave if we open this up we can see that we're we're applying as Dave here Dave is now you know a member of the subscribers and and will now be part of the whole thing so now I've I've sent a reply to that and again if you want to see the the additional capabilities I need to log in to the discussion we can attach documents of course we can do the standard Weaver things like action items and whatnot but another important thing that you can do with this is that if you made a typo you can actually go back and edit your own comments or what other changes now you you may or may not like that you know if you do make a simple typo it's it's it's better just to go in and make the change rather than have everybody respond to this you know obviously wrong thing and again here you click and you do reply and then this is where you do the reply you can even delete your comments if you wish so so as a summary what we did was we created a discussion topic in a workspace we put some comments on there was an email messages sent out announcing it people could then very quickly quickly type on a link enter in their reply that reply gets emailed on to other people but if the result is all the comments are in one place new subscribers can go back and see the old comments and you can add people simply by adding their email address on there also also to line and that then automatically includes them in the whole discussion sorry I hope that gives you a good idea of how to use Weaver to run discussions
