Community system for programmers and domain specialists in a company.

Question

Hi, I have taken on the task of bettering the communication between our company employees by offering them a blog-like site and a forum.

I thought that people could post articles on the blog-frontpage and ask technical and product related questions in the forum section.

We have a MS Sharepoint site, but I don't feel it has the same public appeal as a well run blog and forum.

I was wondering if anyone could reccomend a system that we could use for communication, both serious and casual.

Edit: I want to add that we have a Wiki already, but I want something easier to use. You could say I want an internal "Ars Technica", ie. newspage with forums. I just wondered if there were any readymade systems for this.

Answer 1

How about a wiki?

If you have some budget for this initiative, check out Confluence

Answer 2

Since you have SharePoint, I would recommend SharePoint. The standard group templates are more corporate push down communication, so I would setup a seperate sites for

• Wiki Template
• Blogs
• Forums (but using the one off of CodePlex, the out of the box one sucks)

This is assuming you have MOSS 2007.

Answer 3

I see a lot of folks using PHPBB for these kinds of things, but honestly, the thought of using PHPBB for anything at all makes me cringe! ... And it's not because of PHP even though it's not my preferred language, it's because PHPBB is just atrocious software from a usability perspective.

Trackwiki also springs to mind, although I have no idea if it's applicable to your situation.