Forum Software

This question has nothing to do with iboats or it's forum software.

I am aware that many if not most forums have the capability to post images and download pdf files. My question - Does forum software have the capability for someone to post MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Word documents (or other type files for that matter) for retrieval or posting by others?

I belong to an organization of 400+ members and we need a way to share information. My first thought was to get one of the members to create a web site for this purpose but it seems to me that a web site would be far more restrictive on what a member could do as well take considerable technical effort to create and maintain. We do need a fair amount of flexibility with what we want to do. The freedom to create, change, manage and control information seem to fit a forum format pretty well. We will however need to share more than images and pdf files.

If the capability is there is a forum more difficult to set-up and maintain than a web site (the "developers" and "maintainers would be volunteers)?

Re: Forum Software

sounds like a share on a server (with maybe an html interface so files are easy to find) is all you need. I would not see why a forum could not support those file types.

Re: Forum Software

We had similiar ambitions for my work environment. The basics are pretty much the same as setting up a website. Maintenance will depend greatly on the users and space available on a server. What we ended up going with was xoops forums and they work quite well. Best of all free. The xoops project is open source and highly modifieable so it tends to lend itself to many applications, at least in my opinion. Security, if you need it, is something you will have to look into more. Our site is nothing of a sensitive nature but we did set it up to where you can't view anything until you are registered for it, which has to be made to one of a few people offline. You can check it out here http://www.xoops.org/. Also from my experience with it you have to tell it what file types are elligable for up load as well as file size.