Run a very simple and easy to use private web forum, protected by SSL, on your own computer. Enhance your team's ability to share knowledge and engage in collective problem solving.
Features
This secure forum will provide a meeting place for a group of people, such as a business department, club or society, to share ideas. A forum member can open a topic for discussion by entering the title of the new topic. All the members can read and contribute text comments under the topics that interest them. A comment can reply to the topic, or to a particular comment in the discussion. This allows different threads of ideas about the topic to be explored independently in a clean, structured fashion.
Secure Forum Software is currently suitable for discussions with up to about 50 people actively contributing at the same time. You can make a forum which is accessible to your company intranet, or make it available on the internet. The members will access the forum with their web browsers (Internet Explorer etc), there is no software to install on their computers.
Security
Security is provided by the standard SSL/TLS encryption of all the forum website pages. A username and password have to be given before you can view any information. Running the forum software on your own computer will increase its confidentiality, compared to a forum hosted on somebody else's computer, by removing your need to trust the security of the company providing the hosted forum.
Technical Requirements
The forum program will run on any computer with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. It takes about 50MB of disk space for a small forum, and requires very little processing power and network bandwidth because it is entirely text based.
Your Windows computer will need a domain name before you can get an SSL certificate signed by a Certificate Authority. You can make a forum without a domain name and signed certificate, but you will have to instruct your visitors how to click through the security warning messages which will be displayed when they arrive at the forum.