Recently at work we decided it might be useful if we set up an internal message board for the software engineers, to improve communications and share ideas a little more. Technical issues could be discussed there without flooding people’s inboxes with layer upon layer of quoted CC’s.
The first thing we tried was Sharepoint’s discussion boards, since we were already using Sharepoint for our intranet, but after a few days the verdict was unanimous: it totally sucked! So then we tried the other thing we already had installed: Outlook– Specifically the "public folders" support, which is really just a terrible name for a message board.
That seems to be working out ok… deficiencies in the interface are made up for by a couple of major conveniences:
- Everyone already runs Outlook all the time anyway, so this didn’t require any extra software to be run, nor any additional signup, and meant that you could set it up to easily monitor new posts appearing on the board.
- Being integrated with Outlook means that message formatting and composition is identical to regular mail, including the convenience of being able to copy-paste images into posts. This is a massive plus for me as I really like being to be able to illustrate messages with screenshots.
Another option considered was a third party PHP based system, but this required someone to install and maintain it. PHPBB is well regarded, and used on many popular sites, but after doing a test install here I decided it was a bit too complicated with its enforced categories/subject/thread heirarchy.
I was considering implementing forums here to enourage free conversation without necessarily tying it to a particular post, but figure since my readership is relatively small that the current system of comments works pretty well (and you don’t need to sign in/register or anything, which is a big benefit).
I probably should rethink my skinny column layout for the cases where comments go past 10 though…