I’m introducing sketchup to my colleagues I’d like to set up a private forum for them to discuss ideas and problem solve together - in a way specific to our company. It might also involve sharing sensitive data so it needs to be private and secure.
There would be no more than 40 users.
Does anyone have experience of setting up a forum like this?
Thanks for any pointers.
Simon
Go to your IT department and ask them to install/deploy a forum software on a server and make the URL only accessible from the intranet.
Alternatively, create a forum at a hosting provider where you are the administrator for this forum, configure all subforums/threads to be visible only to registered users and set registration to require manual whitelisting by the administrator (or disable registration and let the admin create all needed user accounts).
Thank you Aerilius. I think I want to do this myself rather than rely on our overstretched IT department. But while I’m pretty SketchUp literate I’m not very IT literate otherwise. Can you recommend any particular forum software? One that is tried and tested by SketchUp users?
simplest would be to use a forums hosting service which would avoid to bother with the IT stuff, common is:
• vBulletin
• Invision Community
If you wanna host a forum by yourself resp. at your hoster but wanna avoid the complex forums software, you should evaluate free ‘myBB’ or alternatively free WordPress WebCMS in connection with a forums plugin (req.: PHP & mySQL).
We use Discourse for these forums.
Our company intranet seems to include some forums too.
Thank you everyone - great info. Much appreciated.
I use a forum software called SMF, its completely free of charge.
This forum itself is running on discourse, which is open source and can be self-hosted.
Find out more on their github repo:
EDIT: need help setting up discourse on your own server/cloud provider? Please feel free to get in touch.