A few months ago I shared my excitement about the new Discussion web part from Quest [link].  To recap, customers switching from the Notes discussions (in the Discussion template, QuickPlaces, Team Rooms, or custom applications) to the SharePoint’s standard Discussion Board template have a few nasty problems:

• The user interface is quite different:  No twistees, No threaded tree-view, like you had in Notes.  Instead you view the parent documents in a flat view and then you open a page that shows the entire thread.
• Only the top-level documents have subject lines.  If your Notes users entered unique subjects on the response documents (I know I always did – in many cases I typed my entire thought in the subject line and left the body blank), then you have data loss!

Quest’s qDiscussion web part solves these problems in a big way.  As shown below, it is easy to use our web part to display a SharePoint Discussion List in a more Notes-like way: expandable tree view, individual subject lines, a customizable action bar, and even a preview pane.

This web part is available in two ways:

• You can get it as FREE DOWNLOAD from SharePointForAll.com [link].  Yup, I said free.  
• It is part of Quest Web Parts for SharePoint product [link], which includes 18 other cool web parts that will be invaluable for rebuilding your more complex Notes applications.  

The qDiscussion web part works very nicely with Notes Migrator for SharePoint, which of course migrates all your threaded discussion content.  In a recent post [link] explained, one of the new features of Quest Web Parts for SharePoint version 5.1 made it a lot easier for Notes Migrator for SharePoint to provision new lists and sites already preconfigured with the qDiscussion web part.

That means some one else (say a well-intentioned product manager) can create a template for you that is already preconfigured to use the web parts.  I will be polishing up my “Enhanced Discussion List” templates within the week for you to download, plug in, and go.