One of the great many new features you will discover when migrating to SharePoint 2010 is the My Sites and My Profile. SharePoint added a new Web Part called the Note Board.

Integrated to Lync and Outlook for presence and out of office, it provides users with the quickest way to leave a message and talk with others.

Bring Social to Collaboration

Most of SharePoint implementations are done for collaboration; Team Sites, Blogs, Wikis, Replacing Shared Drives, etc.

So I had a crazy idea, to bring the NoteBoard to my team sites! Directly in my lists and Libraries.

Choosing where to add the NoteBoard

A good place to add the NoteBoard is where people are going to want to start discussions without starting a Discussion list in SharePoint. Edit Forms and Display Forms are great way to start. These are the forms that SharePoint shows the user when he/she clicks on Edit Properties and View Properties of a list item or a document in a library.

Adding the NoteBoard to a Clients list

I set myself up with a Contact list that I named Clients and added some clients in there.

Next I need to change the Edit Properties and View Properties form to add my NoteBoard in it. In the Ribbon we can easily access these forms to edit them.

Changing the Default Display Form to add the NoteBoard

After clicking on Default Display Form above we enter the page in Edit mode directly. Click on Add a Web Part and find the NoteBoard under Social Collaboration

And click on Add.

By default it might appear at the top of the View Properties form, we can move it below. This should be our result so far.

Testing it out with Angelina

Click on Stop Editing to get out of Edit mode and save your changes. Now choose one of your items in the list, in this case Angelina and click on it or select View Properties in the dropdown menu.

Now we can quickly add notes while looking at the properties of a list item, in this case Clients. This can apply with documents going over a review in a meeting to quickly take notes as well.

Of course you can also apply some branding to it and I would recommend renaming the Web Part to something that is relevant to your context.