Creating my own Message Board

I’m looking for help creating a small, private message board. See, the company I work for is rigidly old-fashioned, and I’ve proposed that we build an internal bulletin board to help different departments communicate each other.

It would need to have five or six forums – one for each department. That way, if say, someone from the sales department had a question regarding product development, he/she could post his/her question in the product development forum, and folks in that department could discuss the issue and hopefully, provide an answer.

Sounded simple to me, but, like I said, the managers at my company are a bit old-fashioned – my supervisors can’t quite picture what I’m talking about. So, I had thought I could merely find some free-ware to download and build a “sample” message board, using department titles, and possibly posting some examples in the forums, I could show them. Turns out, it apparently isn’t that simple.

Problem is, I’m a techno-bozo. I can build a beginners html web page and use MS Frontpage, but that’s the extent of my skills. I’ve Googled around a bit and looked at a few web sites, but most of the software is complicated or “public” or would have flashy ads all across the top (something that would definitely deter my supervisors from considering this project).

Does anyone know of some simple, free software I could download to create such a thing? If anyone has some wisdom or advice to share, I’d really appreciate it.

-Portwest

Do you own FileMaker? I made my own message board pretty easily in FileMaker. (Not as robust or as full-featured as vBulletin, but on the other hand free and homemade)

Seems like what you’re looking for is a paid message board hosting service. I don’t know any but this was the top result on Google: Boardhost. If you just want to try it out, it’s $5 a month and you can upgrade to better plans if it gains any traction.

You could ask an admin to see if they house any servers that support MySQL. If you can get over that hump, I would suggest phpBB.

Saw this too… Won’t recommend as I just found it, but take a look.

If you have your own server for internal use, just download and install phpBB.

An alternative to a bulletin board to consider is something like Bugzilla, which is officially a bug database (where people can file bugs in software). However, you can use it for tracking and conversing over any sort of process.

With Bugzilla, you can set up groups like Development or Sales, and there will be a default recipient for any newly reported issue, that person being the manager of the group. He then reassigns the issue to all the relevant parties. Those people can then leave messages in the issue page, file it as solved or open or reassign it to someone else. The person who filed it can watch it as it progresses. A company I worked for used it to gather new ideas for products and for people to make themselves todo lists. It’s really quite flexible and useful for a business. It also has the advantage of letting you prioritize things by complexity and importance.

So far this is the best free version of a bulletin board that I’ve seen. I still think vBulletin is the best bulletin board, in terms of format and features. (this is the one the SD uses.)

What I would do is look around and see type of bulletin boards you like. Then go to the bottom of the page and it usually says something like

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.7.3

Then you can Google that and see if that bulletin board is free or not. The vBulletin is like $100 for a one time license or $180.00 if you get a license and renewel and support etc. (last time I checked)

If you can get PHP you may want to check out wikis. Mediawiki (used to power the Wikipedia) is very easy to set up and get running, although some features like creating infoboxes and templates can be complex and hard.)

If you can’t get PHP “Dokuwiki” is excellent for creating documentation and uses files and not databases.

If you’re using Windows and have any servers, look at Microsoft SharePoint. It’s free, and is designed to be exactly what a small business needs to enhance collaboration. It has the equivalent of message boards, but a whole lot more as well.

Proboards offers free message boards.
http://www.proboards.com/

Wow, I sure appreciate all the suggestions and information. I can see that what I had in mind probably doesn’t exist.

We do have servers at work, but I am not allowed to download or install software on them. Only IT can do such things; they don’t let mere mortals put random things on the servers.

Neither can I *buy *software – I’m only trying to create an example to “sell” the idea to management, and as our management is a bit stodgy, there’s a chance they may reject the concept. If I were to buy software or a hosting space and my idea were then rejected, then I’d be stuck with that expense.

Like I said: stodgy. A while back, I suggested we start a simple intra-net classified space to buy, sell and trade household good, advertise our babysitting needs, request car-pooling, etc. amongst ourselves. I was quickly turned down, because “then people would be wasting time on the intra-net all day, just like Facebook.” :rolleyes:

The idea of putting a company-related board on an external host would frighten them – they have previously balked at any suggestion that any internal information might be parked on external servers, regardless of security assurances.

That’s why I was hoping I could create an example to show exactly how this could work, to demonstrate how useful it could be, so that they could see what it would look like and how it would work if we built such a thing on our own servers. They need to see something concrete or they assume all sorts of ridiculous things.

Anyway, I can see that it would clearly be a bigger project than I am able to put together on my own, so I’ll let the idea die here.

But I really do appreciate all the info, and will bookmark it for future reference. Thanks!
~Portwest

Just install locally to your personal machine at work. Here’s a couple of videos that will lead you through the process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqxzq12qmxI (uses a thing called wampServer which sets up most of everything automatically)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H3CebqMuew (if wampServer fails, this one shows how to install the packages individually)

I think that’s what I’m after – so I can install it on my c: drive and build a message board there? Cool. Thanks, Sage Rat!