Best system for an online, ongoing office "discussion"

May 2, 2013 8:53 AM

Scenario: Office employees need to be able to log into a system and post opinions/comments on a daily basis for a period of 10 days. These need to be threaded and in response to a prompting question or two each time. Employees should be able to read thru other comments and look back thru older threads. I know there's a gazillion forum systems, and blog alternatives. Do you have a recommendation on which particular system would be best? I do not need a lot of features beyond what's described above. Most blog features would not be used. Not a public (ie. Facebook) type system. Bonus points for: ~ Clean, easy, pleasing, spare interface. ~ Back end tracking by user. ~ Easy install. Thanks!
posted by ecorrocio to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Basecamp? My team uses it in a similar way. We'll get comment threads running inside specific projects, and bonus? you can assign to-dos, so if there is some followup that needs to come out of the discussion, you can make one person responsible for doing X.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 9:02 AM on May 2, 2013

I never ended up getting to this point, but when I was looking for a similar solution, the top candidate I was considering was Swabr, a private-community Twitter clone. Give individual tasks their own hashtag, and voila.

At least in theory.
posted by etc. at 9:04 AM on May 2, 2013

Response by poster: Two nice ones so far. I should note too this is not task related. Think: HR initiative.

And... it would be nice to be able to brand it (ie. no system brand logos).
posted by ecorrocio at 9:07 AM on May 2, 2013

Quite a few companies (including my own employer) are using Jive for this sort of thing. It's way more than just a forum, though, so it might be overkill if a threaded discussion board sort of thing is what you're after.
posted by jquinby at 9:09 AM on May 2, 2013

Yammer is all the rage at my org. We're using the free version and it's pretty useful.
posted by freya_lamb at 1:37 PM on May 2, 2013