As far as I remember a discussion forum is an internal application that most of the organizations would have tried to implement. Basically a discussion forum allows people in the organization to post a question (could be on any topic of relevance irrespective of the area the person is working) and any one in the organization who knows a solution or can give pointers can reply back.  A public discussion forum specific to a technology was hot few years back and used to be a primary source for developers to find  solutions to their problems.  In many organizations (again my experience working in India and what I have heard of) a discussion forum is one of the projects that is assigned to a group of newbie’s joining the organization and it acts as a training project. Most of the time it never gets implemented. Why it is so is altogether a separate topic. But here is a cool open source application, Vanilla that has packaged the features required for enabling a discussion forum in your organization with rich user interface and the ability to extend the application as well. Vanilla requires any web server, PHP 4.1 or above and MySQL 3.23 or greater.

On a side note, today I complete my 300th post. I started blogging since March 11, 2006 and it is a fantastic feeling to spend some time to think, read and write something everyday. Thank you for taking time to read my blog.