Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint

The Lightning Storm Forums are designed and built to be an alternative to the Discussion Boards that come with SharePoint 2007. Many people do not like the SharePoint Discussion Boards as they look and feel quite different to forums that are available on public internet sites.

Click here to download the full screen screencast.

For a longer screencast detailing more of the forums features please click here.

Create a Knowledge Base of Information

After a while your forum will contain lots of great questions and answers you may want users to be able to easily refer to. This is very easy with the Lightning Storm Forums Knowledge Base feature. Take a quick look at the screencast below to see it in action:

The Knowledge Base works very well with the Lightning Conductor Web Part. Contact our sales team to discuss a purchase including both web parts.

Try them out.

We've setup the forums on our SharePoint site that is available for you to try. Please click here and post some topics and replies.

More details...

It has been our aim to build the Lightning Storm Forums to feel more like the standard forums everybody is familiar with.

Download a Trial

Please click here to download a trial of the Lightning Storm Forums.

Current Feature Set

Standard web forum look and feel
User security driven by standard SharePoint groups
Look and feel driven by SharePoint CSS and Themes
Rating of topics
Marking posts as answered
Administration ability to remove/edit topics and posts
Link/Picture from SharePoint Profile/My Site
RSS feeds for individual topics and forums
Anonymous views and posters is configurable
Attach files to forum posts and topics
Knowledge Base functionality for building an FAQ area.

How do they work?

The Lightning Storm Forums are themselves web parts that can be simply added to any SharePoint Web Part page. The post information is being stored within SharePoint lists so no external configuration with SQL Server databases is required. The web parts are using the .NET framework 3.5 so this is required to be installed on your SharePoint Servers.

Purchase Details

The Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint is available for only $600 per SharePoint Server. Software maintenance is 20% of the purchase price per year and includes:

- Product updates, including for new versions of SharePoint
- Unlimited technical support via email, phone and remote desktop

Please click here to purchase the Lightning Storm Forums