In a way, the name isn’t entirely fair. Forums created through the service have plenty of features, including:

• The ability to control how public the forum is.
• The ability to assign users to several different roles. Each role can be assigned a different level of access, and can even be allowed to invite a certain number of others to join the forum if desired.
• Email notifications of posting activity.
• The ability for users to participate in private conversations.
• Basic spam filtering, through limiting the number of posts and length of comments.
• User profiles and avatars.
• Search capability.
• A customizable URL, like your_name.vanillaforums.com.

What the hosted version of Vanilla doesn’t have, at least right now (the current release is 1.1.8, but version 2 is in beta).

• Themes. If you want a look other than the standard blue-and-white design, you’ll need to host the package yourself (see below).
• Documentation. The hosted version has zero help, although the service does use tool tips and panes with helpful hints like “Here’s some stuff you might want to do.” But I found using the site to be pretty simple.
• Clarity on pricing and features. I’m not sure what storage and activity limitations may be placed on the free hosted version. The web site does mention a premium service, although I couldn’t find anywhere that lists features and prices.

The Vanilla open-source software package for forums is also available, if you want to host a forum yourself. It’s set up so that you can add CSS-based themes, or create them yourself. There is, by the way, considerable documentation for this version, including a wiki and (guess what?) a discussion forum.

All in all, Vanilla Forums is a surprisingly robust alternative to other discussion forum options, and may appeal to those who don’t want to deal with hosting a discussion forum, or who don’t want the hassles of managing something like phpBB.

Have you used Vanilla Forums? What do you use for discussion forums?

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Cyn.in is an open source collaboration app, and as such only offers a portion of the functionality of Liferay, but those looking for a more pure collaboration platform, and not a full-fledged intranet, may find it more tailored to their specific needs.

Cyn.in is centralized software that collects all of your basic collaboration software, like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, etc. It also supports file sharing and repositories. I tried the live demo to get a sense of what Cyn.in has to offer, with a special focus on how it might compare to Liferay regarding my specific goal of using it to help organize and grow my collaborative writing blog.

The demo allows you to log in to an enterprise edition install of Cyn.in, using one of the dummy accounts they’ve set up for their demo corporations, Widgets Inc. Different accounts are attached to different levels of employee, from junior management to executives.

For my test run, I signed on using a Senior Managment account. Immediately, you’re greeted with a mind map which breaks down your company’s spaces and views. This map was an interactive flash element, which I found buggy and not necessarily intuitive. Cynapse does warn that performance might be unusual since many people could be logged on to the demo at the same time using the same accounts.

Underneath the mind map is a notification area, broken down into subsections. Here you can see all recent updates, your own items, view the boss’s blog and status log, and see recently active discussions. Overall, it feels a tad cluttered, but it’s a good snapshot of what’s going on across the company.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you have your personal control toolbar. From there, you can update your status, view/change your profile and preference, and log out of cyn.in. You can also subscribe to email notifications and view upcoming events. I’m still not entirely sure how the email subscription system works. It looks like you can subscribe to the content of whatever page you happen to be viewing, which, if true, would come in handy.

Creating spaces was easy enough. I created one called “Disaster Control”, to see what options were available. One nice feature was the ability to postpone the publication date of any particular space, so that you can plan project streams and lines of business that are not yet active beforehand, and have them go live automatically whenever others are meant to have access to them.

Building a wiki for the space was also not too much trouble, although I found it far less intuitive than Liferay’s interface. I had to create a new wiki page from the top menu in order to set a home page in the Disaster Recovery area. A simple link in the wiki tab would’ve made things a lot more clear.

Overall, Cyn.in seems like a fairly powerful tool, especially if your users are knowledgeable and experienced in customized enterprise collaboration software. It lacks the pick-up-and-play feel of Liferay, in my opinion, but does offer an SaaS option and an Enterprise license that takes all of the setup footwork out of the equation for you, if you’re looking to spend a good amount of cash. There’s also the free open source software, but you have to run it on your own server.

I’d recommend Cyn.in for consultants working with larger, established companies looking for an alternative to their current collaboration solution. DIYers on the other hand will probably want to stick with Liferay or something similar.

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