Gizmo are happy users of the Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint. Troy Cox was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about how they use SharePoint and the forums web part:
Tell us a little about your organization and how you use SharePoint?
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is used extensively by gizmo. It hosts:
- Our file store (we don’t have any file servers or VPN infrastructure at gizmo)
- Our entire operations manual is stored in a 3rd party Wiki
- Publishing KPIs and performance metrics
- All training is managed through SharePoint – we’re currently trialling SharePoint Learning Management System (LMS), a 3rd party SCORM app
- Each team has their own private team collaboration site
- Discussion forums using the Lightning Storms Forums
- Forms Centre for finding corporate forms
- Enterprise search for finding content in any of the sites
- Department directory
What do you use the Lightning Storm Forums for?
The Lightning Storm Forums are used by our technicians and customer service agents to create dialogue on topics such as:
- Technical issues that they are having with a particular case
- Industry trends
- Process questions
- How to questions
Here's a screenshot of our forums in action:
(please click to see a larger version)
What particular features do your users prefer over the SharePoint Discussion boards?
- Subscribing to a specific post
- Marking a post as answered
- Ratings
- Search which is integrated with SharePoint search
- Uses SharePoint security to control access (we don’t use anonymous posting)
How satisfied are you with Lightning Tools?
We’ve done an exhaustive search for 3rd party forum applications and Lightning Storm Forums is clearly the most advanced and most like standard forums that you find on the Internet. Our user base is primarily technicians who frequent Internet forums so the Lightning Storm Forums was an obvious choice because our users already know how to take advantage of forums with these features. Because of the familiarity with Internet style forums, our user based embraced Lightning Storm Forums very quickly. We are extremely delighted with the capability.