Adding a "Message Board" to a Dashboard

MCorbin

Has anyone created a widget that would add "message board" type capability to a dashboard? And if so, how did you do it?

I've got a team fitness challenge dashboard and I'd love to add the ability for participants to post and respond to messages.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

David Joyeuse

Hi @MCorbin

Honestly I never tried to do that, but I believe there's some kind of workaround.

First would be to create a sheet with these automated columns in it:

• Date Created
• Created by

From this create a form out of it with just one cell that would "Message". People would then typing their message in it and submit. Make sure here that people have to be registered to post the message! Otherwise, that would kill the fun.

An option here would be to add a tag column, which would be contact list (multiple allowed) on this form where people could tag other members. Out of this, you could send notifications through automated workflow to people being tagged.

Also, you may add the ability to link documents so people may load picture or whatever as well.

Then create a report out of this and display messages as you will, such as message that are less than 3 days old, or a week, up to you. Don't forget to display the created by column so people know who said what.

Then display the report on your dashboard, and link clicking on the report to the form should do the trick.

Hope it helped!

David Joyeuse

Hi @MCorbin

Honestly I never tried to do that, but I believe there's some kind of workaround.

First would be to create a sheet with these automated columns in it:

• Date Created
• Created by

From this create a form out of it with just one cell that would "Message". People would then typing their message in it and submit. Make sure here that people have to be registered to post the message! Otherwise, that would kill the fun.

An option here would be to add a tag column, which would be contact list (multiple allowed) on this form where people could tag other members. Out of this, you could send notifications through automated workflow to people being tagged.

Also, you may add the ability to link documents so people may load picture or whatever as well.

Then create a report out of this and display messages as you will, such as message that are less than 3 days old, or a week, up to you. Don't forget to display the created by column so people know who said what.

Then display the report on your dashboard, and link clicking on the report to the form should do the trick.

Hope it helped!

MCorbin

Thanks @David Joyeuse

I had more or less come up with the same idea (although the contact list to tag other members would be fun).

I was hoping there was some top secret widget I didn't know about yet! 😂

Dyoung8

@MCorbin Did you ever get a solution to this? I am now in search of something like this for my business and was just curious.

MCorbin

@Dyoung8 I've done this a couple of ways (depends on what you have with your account):

1. Both solutions use a form to add a message
2. To display the messages, you can either: a) use a report, sorted in descending order by date created or date modified, to display the messaged or b) if you have Dynamic View, I prefer to use that for displaying messages (I still build the dynamic view off of a report so that I can default sort most newest to oldest).

Here's a screenshot of one using a Dynamic View: