Comments for Content Types

Question

One piece of functionality I thought was oddly unincluded in SharePoint 2010 was the ability to create comment trails for content types other than blog posts and to a lesser extent discussion boards.

I'm working on a SharePoint server where several custom content types built could benefit from comment trails. So far online I've only found semi-solutions to this problem. I've found solutions that allow a user to post a comment once (which is why I keep using the phrase comment trail, so that people can respond back to each other) and a solution that creates an associated list that tracks the content type's ID and does commenting that way.

While I'm not knocking those solutions, they really aren't scalable (I'd have to create several associated lists) nor do I think they'd work well with search.

Has anyone come across a solution that adds commenting to non-OOB content types with comments? Paid or free -- I would just like to see if anyone has found a better way to do this than my current best answer of creating several associated lists.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not sure what exactly you are looking for:

A multi line text field with option: "Append Changes to Existing Text" does not work for you?

UPDATE: Based on your comments, I think you are looking for a full comments and rich functionality. Check out solution below:

http://blog.octavie.nl/index.php/2011/09/04/customizing-listitem-forms-using-renderingtemplates/

Answer 2

This is not available out of the box but fairly easy achieved using a custom list to store the comments in and a lookup column to the list holding the items to be commented on. Users can then add items (comments) in that custom list and select the item they are commenting on in the lookup column drop down.

To show the comments about a certain item, add 2 listview webparts on a page and bind them the top 1 to the source list and the bottom 1 to the comments list. Create a connection between the 2 webparts and have the top 1 act as a filter on the webpart showing the comments