vBulletin for internal company use

[prashbp]

Hi,

I am exploring to use vBulleting for improving collaboration between team members and this would be for totally internal use. I have the below questions:

1. How good is vBulletin as an internal company collaboration tool? are any companies using it as a discussion forum within their intranet?

2. Can vBulletin be hosted on internal company server and not on a third party server to make sure the discussions dont leave the intranet

3. How much can the look and feel of vBulletin be customized to "FIT" it into our set of daily use tools in the company?

4. Can vBulletin be accessed by handheld devices and smartphones?

5. How does the licensing work? If i buy one license, can i create 10 forums with different users in every forum? what is the maximum number of forums I can create with one license. The teams are usually 8 - 20 people and there are several of them.

6. Very trivial I guess, but please bear with me. Can I set it up a "by invitation forum"?

7. Can I link vBulleting profiles to windows single signon?

Many thanks for your patience. I would also be happy to talk to you on phone and get answers to these questions.

Prashanth

[feldon23]

1. I think vBulletin 3.8 is the best forum software out there for internet and intranet communication and discussion.

2. vBulletin will run on any server with the requisite versions of PHP/MySQL installed.

3. vBulletin can be customized substantially, but the more you customize it, the more complex workflow you are creating for yourself with each subsequent software update. It's very easy to slap your own logo up at the top, change out the buttons, change the color scheme, etc. But as you start to rearrange the layout of the forum, add or remove columns, etc. you start to make it difficult to upgrade. I just keep my edits to a fair minimum.

4. There is currently no support mobile style for vBulletin, but some site operators are making use of Tapatalk. Tapatalk is an iPhone app that can connect to any vBulletin forum which has installed the Tapatalk bridge. Tapatalk is not free. We continue to push for vBulletin to *ship* with a fully supported mobile style or styles.

5. Each unique forum (with separate discussions, separate user lists) is a separate license. If you wanted 10 forums with different users in each forum, that's 10 licenses. HOWEVER, I see no reason why you cannot have 1 forum, allowing all users to register (or doing manual registration of each user), and use the extremely robust User Permissions and User Group features of vBulletin to add and remove users from different Projects and Teams. vBulletin makes it easy to add a user to one or more Usergroups, and grant progressively more permissive permissions in each Usergroup.

6. Absolutely.

7. No. vBulletin has no official or support means of communicating with any other user login/credentials API. It's maddening, but hopefully they'll do something about it.

Also, for the time being, I strongly suggest buying a vBulletin license, but using vBulletin 3.8. It's stable, robust software that's easy to deploy and customize. vBulletin 4 is still in the teething stages.

[Zachery]

1/2 As good as you make it out to be? There are companys who use the software internally. vBulletin can be hosted wherever as long as the webserver supports php and mysql.
3. You can take the time to customize the software as much as you want.
4. If they have web browsers, yes. I acccess vBulletin.com and other vBulletin sites without issue on my Pre.
5. You can have one installation of the vBulletin software, vBulletin.com is 1 installation.
6. You can set the forum to only approve users, or turn off registration so only you can add them.
7. Its possible, but not out of the box and not without some modifications to the code.