### Browsing a discussion forum

BSCW provides different ways to display the contents of notes and to browse a discussion forum. In the discussion overview, all notes are displayed in a box along with subject and author. You may customize the display of the discussion overview by selecting your viewing options.

• Enable or disable the display of note contents in the discussion overview by selecting or de-selecting View Note contents . When the display of note contents is enabled, all notes have an individual foldout button ( or ) that allows to show or hide the contents of a note. In addition, these two foldout buttons also appear in the multi-selection toolbar to show or hide the contents of selected notes. If no notes are selected, these buttons will take effect on all notes.

• Select the note attributes you want to have displayed in the discussion overview via View Columns .

• Sort the notes by type, date, author, subject or thread by selecting the respective entry in View Sort by ... . The default sorting criterion is by thread: in this case, all notes belonging to a thread are grouped into one note box.

• By activating the option View Foldout you get an additional button ( or ) in the upper right-hand corner of a note that lets you switch from full to minimal display of a note and back again.

Click on a note to switch to the single note view where the note contents and links to other notes, if any, are displayed. Use these links to browse the discussion forum, which may eventually lead to other discussion forums, e.g. when a note is a reply to a note from another discussion forum. The single note view also offers a navigation bar on top where you can browse the notes of a discussion forum backwards and forwards using the arrow icons and , the notes being sorted by the current sort criterion activated via View Sort in the top menu of the discussion forum view. Click on the name of the discussion forum in the header line of the single note view to return to the discussion overview.