Hi everyone! I work for a public university and need to create a new forum. Never done this before and was hoping you experts out there could give me some advice. We have our own website, servers, etc... so that isn't an issue. Our online community will include university employees that use our data warehouse. The only 2 requirements I have are the ability to link to our current authentication system (so users can log-in to post messages) and the ability to include attachments in messages (such as sample reports and SQL code). The community will consist of business professionals, so I want to build a professional and user-friendly forum. Been reading a lot about VBulletin on this site. Do you think VB would work? Any other suggestions?

Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it!!!

Might wanna repost in programming...

Perhaps not, four years later...

get a Vbulletin forum script and install it..
http://www.vbulletin.com/index.php

its easy to run it....

You could use PHPBB - http://www.phpbb.com/

I've only used PHPBB once - when I was in Year 8 (six years ago now - sheeesh lol) and it was very beneficial

Hope this helps,
David

I didnt see the date, it showed up as unresolved. I don't know anything about the technicality of things so i wanted to make sure you had your question addressed somewhere that it could be helpful.

If you have your own website and server, then why don't you use the fantastico option to create your own forum. It is much easier, just few clicks.

It is a good choice but what is the topic in your forum?I mean,what topic do you exactly plan?

What language do you intend to use. If your servers have php then phpbb is free for you to use and quite customisable but it has it's own auth system as does vbulletin. I'm not sure how easy it is to re-configure these to use your existing system. I know you can install php on windows servers as well using xampp. But if you are using Windows servers then your best bet may be to use something like sharepoint or possibly look at dotnetnuke. I think sharepoint works off AD and I'm not sure if you can get dotnetnuke to do the same.

Also when you say you have your own servers do you mean with a hosting company or are they physically your own servers within the University?

Nice idea to start a forum. You can set it on your server.