Hi Chris,

We've worked with many of the message board software packages available on the market today. Our experience goes back to when the only "enterprise level" options were iChat, WebCrossing, and eShare... I'm familiar with VBulletin due to its use on a couple of The Active Network web communities, but not entirely sure that it's a good fit for enterprise size communities.

All platforms have their pluses and minuses. However, for an organization as large as Pets.com what is appealling about VBulletin? Looking at your community, the set up is a little confusing as the users have to click several times to get to the discussions (which are not really threaded for ease of reading). Is that what you want to change? Is it the cost or that you only want message boards and nothing else? I guess it comes down to why aren't you happy with what you are using today?

The ability to easily administer the site should be a major consideration as well as whether the software can integrate into other areas of the site to drive activity (see Clearstep's 2.5 for the community everywhere feature).

I guess it comes down to what are your requirements for the software, then put those against the feature set of the vendors within your budget. If you can provide some details on your requirements and metrics about your communities size and activity levels that would also help me to give you some better ideas.

Mike

Chris - sorry about the UI issue.  Just so you know there is a button in the tool bar to quote the previous thread as well as the ability to highlight a particular statement as a quote.  Both are circled in the pic below (click on the pic to increase the size).

Here's an example of what happens when clicking ont the quote icon.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the details. I think that you'll find most of the top platforms on the market today to be very intuitive for members to use, with good admin controls as well. The bells and whistles for community software are not all that different from vendor to vendor. Most will be able to provide a consistent branding experience for your community that strengthens or enhances the brand rather than detracting from it. However, you'll need to do the due diligence yourself (or have your staff look into this), but here is what I can tell you from our recent experience.

As part of a strategy and management engagement, we reviewed the following vendors - Jive, Small World Labs, Lithium, Leverage software, and Telligent's Community Server. Each has its benefits and some drawbacks. In the end we recommended Jive due to the customization capabilities and for the overall fit of offering that would meet our client's community members' needs while integrating into the existing platform/CMS systems in use. The IT and web team at our client is currently playing with the customization on a test site and is very happy so far. (DISCLOSURE: We are not partners with Jive and received no compensation for our recommendation. We are not aligned with any software vendors, and only recommend what platform would work best for our clients. This time it happened to be Jive that met our client's needs.)

My concern with VBulletin is that while intuitive and customizable, it may not be as scalable as you need for a potentially large community. At the same time, I would be concerned about how well it meshes with your business goals in terms of playing well with your other systems. Lastly, because everything we do is based upon metrics and analysis, how well does VBulletin's software play with your site's web analytics package? We know that Jive works well with Omniture and with Webtrends.

Feel free to contact me if you want to know more. But I would definitely recommend that you play with the Jive platform for a while to understand its benefits as a comparison point with VBulletin or any other platform you may be considering. Just my two cents...

Mike

How does the cost structure/licensing costs work for external communities?  We're also in the initial stages of researching this...I've used vBulletin forums.

Don't worry about a ban hammer - we really value these kinds of discussions at Jive.... keep 'em coming

Gary - for a car club, unless you have a funding model and a staff in place, VB, SMF will work better for you.  Realistically, unless you want to hire someone or learn a *ton* about technology I'd suggest using a pre-built solution - haven't looked at those in years, but Yahoo Groups and Delphi Forums used to be very popular.