About Web Discussions

The Web Discussions feature enables users to attach comments to a Web page or to any document that can be opened with a browser (such as .htm, .xls, .doc, and .ppt files) so that the comments appear with the document but are stored on a discussion server.

Note The term document is used generically here to refer to any file you can open in a Microsoft Office application and view in a Web browser.

The discussions are threaded. Users reviewing your document can use the Web Discussions toolbar to view and reply to any discussion. You can then review discussions and incorporate changes to your document based on the feedback you receive.

All users with discussion permissions can open a document in Microsoft Internet Explorer and use the Web Discussions toolbar in Internet Explorer. Users of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint can also use the Web Discussions toolbar in those applications. Users of all other Office applications must use Internet Explorer.

Note The browser-based Web Discussions toolbar is available only in Internet Explorer 4.0 and later.

You can discuss the whole document, using general discussions, or insert comments in a particular part of a document, using inline discussions.

Note For documents that you view in a browser, inline discussions are available only in HTML-formatted files. For documents that you open in an Office application, inline discussions are available only in Microsoft Word.

You can filter discussions— for example, view comments that are from a particular person or posted on a particular date. You can also show or hide discussion information so that you can focus only on the information you want to see:

Show and hide individual discussion comments or entire discussions.
Show and hide the Discussion pane.
Drag the top border of the Discussion pane to make it larger or smaller.
Close a discussion once the issues have been resolved. The discussion is not deleted; you can choose to view closed discussions, and you can reopen a closed discussion.
Show or hide the subject, user name, or other header information.
Note Discussion header information includes two names for each participant: Display name and User name. Display name is the name that participants set in an Office application; User name is the logon name that a system administrator sets.

When you add discussion comments to a document, your text is stored in a database on a discussion server. The document you are discussing may or may not be located on the same computer as the discussion server where your comments are stored— in fact, the document you are discussing can be anywhere on your LAN or the Internet.

If the document you are discussing is located on a discussion server, your discussion comments are automatically stored on that server. However, you can override this behavior by specifying a particular server to use for all your discussions. You may need to switch to a different discussion server to view discussions that someone else creates.