Ideal Science: Bulletin Board Software: Here’s a very high-end Web forum product that runs on Windows. With all the free alternatives out there Invision, PhpBB, vBulletin, Snitz, etc.) I don’t know how someone can stay float selling these things (especially for $2,000…on Windows, no less).
I mention it because their feature list does look very good. It includes support for versioning posts, which is rare. Also, Car and Driver has an install running with 17,000 registered members and over one million posts on it. That’s a lot of talking and it makes my biggest Invision PowerBoard install look small.
I’ve always wondered if someone could make an intranet solely out of one of these. With permission masks and file uploads, there’s an awful lot of collaboration that could be done with one of these installs and nothing else. Classification of threads and posts would help a lot (is this post a task, a news item, a best practice, etc.).
I remember Jakob Nielsen’s “Best Intranet of 2001” went to silverorange. I paid $44 for the report and in it silverorange said that the forums they have on their intranet have virtually eliminated the use of internal email at their company.
Their software is awesome. It you are selling to large enterprise, $2000 is a small drop in the bucket.
