Live Groups doesn’t post updates to the “What’s new” feeds when someone posts an update to a discussion thread. This is unfortunate, and I hope that one day it will be included as a feature. But for now we have to make due with what we have.
Here is a simple work around. It is imperfect, but it does send out a “What’s new” notice. First, you can simply post a note to your own profile. That is shared with your network per your permissions. Then just delete the note. The update remains on your “What’s new” feed even though the note has been removed. This method, however, does not provide the linkage we would like that takes you to the discussion (unless, perhaps you manually include it in the note). We can use Shared Favorites to accomplish that.
There are a couple ways to add a Shared Favorite to your Live Account. The easiest is with the Windows Live Toolbar. You simply click the Share button:
After you click the Share Button a pop up window will open with some options:
You’ll want to change both fields. The Name field defaults to the name of the web page. As you can see here – it is pretty generic as “Group Discussions – Windows Live.” I change it to the name of the group or whatever might draw attention to the page I am working on. It can be anything – so long as you haven’t already used it. So, doing this for the same group over and over will result in having to use a unique name each time or that you’ll have to go and clean up old link before you make the new one.
You can accomplish that by going into SkyDrive and entering your Shared Favorites folder, find the old link and delete it. You will want to do this periodically, anyway, as these links tend to accumulate like dust bunnies!
I usually put the first line or two of my discussion post in the description box. You can actually leave this blank if you like, but I think it makes a fine attention grabber if you do it right. Here is what it ends up looking like:
(http://stump-the-creationist.groups.live.com/ – thanks for this fun group X! We are all friends, and thanks for asking about this technique.)
So, if the reader were to click on the Stump-the-creationist Group link it will take them right to the post page, if they are a member of the group, or to the signup page if they aren’t. Notice the little extra you get by virtue of this being a Shared Favorite. You can also add a comment directly to the Shared Favorite which could, in effect, be yet another place to start a discussion!
Anyway, you can do all this without the toolbar. I will make a post on that later, but the process is similar, but the steps are all manual. Sorry Mac people!
There are permissions for the Shared Favorites. So, you can limit who will see these updates. If you only use Shared Favorites to work around the shortcomings of Live Groups lack of notifications then you can add a category in your network for just the people you want to share with. And then edit the permissions for Shared Favorites for just these people. You could, if you wanted, switch the permissions before the sharing, and then switch them back to normal afterwards. This is clumsy but we have what we have to work with.
Perhaps if enough people start doing this the Live Team will take notice and realize that we seriously want group updates to the “What’s new” feeds!
-Jeff
