Browse and Manage Boards

This article will help you understand how to browse Boards in the Notebook and manage them if you are an administrator.

Instructions

To get to the Notebook, click on the Notebook link in the navigation bar at the top of the page.

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If you are unfamiliar with forums, this Wikipedia article is very thorough. What you need to know is that our Lab Tools forum is known as the Notebook. The Notebook has several Boards. These Boards hold Posts, which may or may not have Replies. I’ll illustrate this hierarchy below:

• Notebook (forum)

  • Richardson Design Center 104 (board)

    • Welcome to the RDC Lab! (post)

      • “Thanks” (reply)

So when you need to put some sort of information on Lab Tools, the first question is, “What Board does this belong in?” Luckily for us, each lab has its own Board. If it belongs in multiple boards, that’s not a problem, you just need to pick one “parent” but this can be arbitrary. See Make Posts for more information.

To create, update, and delete boards, click the Manage button in the top-right portion of the Notebook’s main index page.

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Once you click on Manage, you should see two tables: the first is a list of Boards, the second is a list of Tags. To change the name, description, or associated Lab of a Board, simply click Edit in the Actions dropdown menu next to the Board you’d like to edit. From this screen you can also delete a board, which is a rather drastic action that cannot be undone. Alternatively, you can merge a board, which will take all of its posts and put them somewhere else.

In the screenshot above, I am taking all posts from the Education 220 Board and moving them into the Archive Board. Once that is done, the Education 220 Board will be deleted automatically. This is useful for Boards that are created for temporary needs (like online work) or labs that close permanently but we still want to keep records just in case.