SharePoint is an amazing product that allows employees of an organization to collaborate and communicate thanks to all the tools they provide. One of that tools is the SharePoint out-of-the-box discussion board list. Thanks to this list, people can open a conversation in SharePoint and make a series of questions and answers within the same conversation thread, but let’s be honest this discussion board list is far from becoming a collaborative tool where centralize the exchange of knowledge and draw conclusions beyond the simple conversation.

Today we will write about RIVER,  a SharePoint based tool developed by ENCAMINA that transforms radically it to create a complete and perfect enviroment to exchange ideas, questions and knowledge, giving the ability to the users to grade the contributions, energizing the conversation, giving an added value to it and making it useful for organizations that want extract some conclusions about the conversations within this SharePoint feature.

RIVER is so easy to install and configure, once we have configured the PowerShell script according to the instructions, it will create the Web Application, the site collection for RIVER and will deploy all the artifacts such as webparts, lists, pages and all the needed infraestructure.

Once we have deployed RIVER, it is ready to use. The first time the user comes into RIVER platform, they have to accept the privacy policy of the organization. Once accepted it, the user will be free of make full use of river, making questions, answers, rating…

Some RIVER features are:

• Home page with intelligent search, tag filtering and questions list.

• Question detail page with information about it, answers, visits and rating.

• Search results page.
  
• New question page with WYSIWYG rich text editor.
• User profile page with reputation grade based on their contribution to the RIVER forums.

In conclusion, a great product that  transforms SharePoint, giving it the capability to share ideas and conversation generated by the organization personnel and make it profitable to innovate and improve in different areas of the company. For more information, please visit the oficial page or contact with ENCAMINA.