Anonymous Comment Feature for SharePoint Blog - now available on CodePlex
Quite a few SharePoint customers have asked about how to implement blogs internally within their companies as an open, direct, and efficient communication channel for executives to get feedback from employees. One often requested feature that SharePoint does not provide out-of-the-box is support for anonymous comments when a SharePoint blog site uses Integrated Windows Authentication and hence automatically signs the visitor in, which is the typical configuration within an intranet environment.
Microsoft's IT Group developed a custom web part that replaces the out-of-the-box Comments web part and extends it to support posting anonymous comments with the following functionality:
- The Post Anonymously check box can be enabled/disabled (enabled by default).
- The Post Anonymously check box can be deselected by a visitor to have his or her corporate network account name displayed with the published comment.
- The web part includes an embedded JavaScript that can be configured to write any replacement value for a user’s account name.
- The JavaScript also supports replacing a specified editor account name with a designated replacement value and URL.
Here's what the custom web part looks like:
Compared to the OOTB web part:
The custom web part has been successfully implemented and is currently in use at Microsoft on several executive blogs, including the popular InsideMS blog maintained by Lisa Brummel, Senior VP of Human Resources. Microsoft's IT Group has graciously donated the web part with full source code to be released as part of the Community Kit for SharePoint shared source project. The files are available here.
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