Forums are communities where people discuss topics of interests, concerns, controversy, offer helpful suggestions and tips for doing business, offer valuable resources to others and sometimes really give their opinions about products, services and businesses that operate online. Some are good and sometimes negative. Many online businesses have taken advantage of having forums since they strongly believe that keeping in constant contact and communication lines open with customers and potential customers is the way to increase their client base and it fosters trust and loyalty between the two parties. It’s also a great opportunity for business owners to get to know customers on a more personal level and to learn something from their target market needs.
The following are the types of forums: Cascaded Summit
This type of forum is a summit page that typically is hierarchically linked to another summit. (Just as folders can contain links to subfolders, summits can contain links to cascaded summits.) If the top summit includes a very large group of users who need their own private work area, then a cascaded summit can serve this purpose. (Small groups can create a team area, which is described later in this section.) For example, the top summit can serve every employee in a company, and cascaded summits can serve each department: Engineering Department, Human Resources Department, Marketing Department, and so on.
Discussion and Document-Sharing Forums
This type of forum, nicknamed "docshare" forums, provides access to threaded discussions, documents, URLs, and surveys. Threaded discussions are posted notes in the form of topics and replies to the topic.
Calendar Forums
This type of forum provides you with a mechanism for tracking your appointments and tracking a list of tasks that you must accomplish (a "to do" list). Calendars can exist for all of the users of the summit (if the summit administrator creates the calendar), for members of a team, or for your personal use (accessed from the Forum Tracker page, which is described later in this section).
Newspaper Forums
This type of forum provides access to news articles from e-mail news services, Internet newsgroup articles, and tracked web pages. Newspapers can exist for all the users of the summit (if the summit administrator creates a newstand to contain them), for members of a team, or for your personal use (in the form of the MyNews section, which you access from the Forum Tracker page). Before users can create newspapers, the Forum administrator needs to do configuration work to enable these forums. Also, your server machine must have access to the Internet and to news sources. If you are not able to create or use newspapers or the MyNews feature, check with your Forum administrator to see if newspapers are enabled for this installation of Forum.
The Forum Tracker
This type of forum provides you with a personal home page from which you can track activity in the other forums you use most often. This home page provides access to your favorite links to the World Wide Web, your personal calendar, your personal docshare forum, and your MyNews folders. There are two ways to track activity in other forums you use most often. You can view the "Notifications" folder in the MyNews section of the Tracker. You can also specify the name and URL a particular forum you want to track, and the Tracker keeps a running total of all of the new and modified entries included in that forum since you last used it. The Forum administrator can prevent the creation and use of personal calendars and docshares. Also, you cannot create MyNews folders until the administrator configures the newspaper forums. If you are not able to create and use these forums, contact your system administrator for more information.
Teams
This type of forum provides a private work area for a small group of people working toward a time-limited goal. This work area includes a private docshare forum, a calendar, a newspaper, and an easier ability to chat with each other. Teams can be created and disbanded quickly. All team members have the ability to administer the team area by changing team properties (adding a team member, removing a team member, changing the background color of the pages, and so forth).
The Web File System
This forum allows you to place files into Forum so that you or your teammates can have easier access to them. When you place files in this forum, you or your teammates can access the files using a web browser from your office, from home, while on a business trip, from a coworker's office, or from anywhere you are able to access the Forum summit page.
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