Best Web Forums for Businesses?

ClintJCL asks: "I've recently been tasked to create an online web forum for my employer. Actually, they said 'weblog' but when I got more clarification, it is not really a blog but more of a message forum that is what they want. How do I find a good forum? I have looked into many, many forums, and there are simply too many out there to compare them all myself. Is there a website that reviews online forums and their software? Is there somebody who is experienced in doing this, that perhaps has some good advice?" We last touched on this subject exactly a year ago, and it seems that businesses are warming to the idea. Have new and better options popped up in the intervening time?

"I had started one with a particular provider and worked a few hours on customizing it. Then they wiped my settings back to the defaults without explanation. This is -exactly- the type of thing I would wish to avoid.

The forum would have to support privacy (only approved users get access, since this would be for internal communication only), and it would have to support attachments (since one of the main purposes is for us to store our official documents there).

I strongly suggested that we run one on our own servers, but it seems that this is not an option, so we must look for a 3rd party to supply us with the forum."

Comments

Why not a Wiki?

[ThenAgain]

I've had success with Wikis in organizing office proceedures, documentation, logs, etc. They take just a little more lernin' than a simple "post your message here" arrangement, but they reward you with the ability to create flexible and extensible structures quickly. I use TWiki because it has a flexible calendar plugin. There are several open-source Wiki's available.

Most modern Wiki software (TWiki included) has revision control so no matter what they do they can't break it. The hard part is getting the luddites to adopt it. If that gets tough you can set up a sensible structure yourself and use TWiki's comment plugin to make it easy on them.