Understanding Discussions

Discussions are used to facilitate unstructured work, allowing multiple people to interact “chat style” about a particular topic.

Common topics are: Teams, Service Requests, and Tasks.

You can invite others (internal or external) to participate in a discussion. If you are not actively in a discussion when activity takes place, you will be kept informed by occasional emails and digest emails of the discussion.

Some of the great benefits of discussions:

• New people can be added into the discussion as needed
• New people added into the discussion can see the full history of the discussion
• Discussion messages can include attachments

Using a Discussion

If you have a specific task or approval to assign, particularly one with a specific due date, you'd want to use a subtask. However, if you

• want to have a conversation about a topic
• aren't sure who you need to assign a task to so you need to talk to some people about it first
• need to include the requester in a conversation
• need to include external folks in a topic
• may need to invite more people as time goes along to help you solve the issue

you will want to use a discussion. There are even more applicable use cases, but these are a few you are likely to run across.

Inviting people and Adding Attachments

When in a discussion, you add a comment to it in the bar down at the bottom of the screen. On the left side of that bar is a menu with two icons. The paperclip lets you add attachments and the plus sign lets you invite people. Anyone with an email can be invited.