How to integrate Sharepoint Community Features

Question

I have a web site for showing different reports like these examples

http://contoso.com/report.aspx?id=1
http://contoso.com/report.aspx?id=2

In each report page I want to embed a Sharepoint control that will allow me to:

1. Start a discussion for each report
2. Add Comment/response to the existing thread for the report
3. Rate the report on a scale of 1 to 5 and provide comments

As is implicit, a Sharepoint forum will be the backing store and can be accessed directly as well.

1. Is this possible in Sharepoint 2007? How difficult if so?
2. How can I implement such a scenario?

Answer 1

To best answer your question, I need to know what a report actually is. I assume a report is a Word document.

You probably need to do some custom coding for this to work well. One approach might be:

1. Create a Document Library.
2. Create a Discussion Forum.
3. Add a column to the Document library for storing the rating on a scale of 1-5.
4. Create a WebPart that displays the document and it's metadata including your score.
5. Have an event receiver or Workflow on the Document Library that creates a new top level thread each time a report it added with the title of the document as the subject.
6. Have code in your webpart that queries for all items in the discussion forum where the thread starting title is the name of the document, and display the thread.

It would probably require some C# and WebPart development skills to accomplish this task. Not something a beginner could do.

Answer 2

What if you want to have multiple users to be able to vote/rate the report?