This is a great topic!
We use Discourse in a number of ways that deviate from a standard discussion forum. Over the last 6 moths or so we have been exploring the concept of Discourse as a tool for teamwork. Right now we use it
- as our customer support inbox
- to schedule our weekly calls (using discourse-chronos aka local dates)
- to do our weekly check-ins (or equavilent of stand-ups)
- as a management tool to manage our teams and workload (using discourse-assign)
- as a policy and compliance monitoring tool (using discourse-policy)
- to manage the onboarding of new team members (using discourse-checklist)
- for learning games ( e.g. fix a bug from our logs and then assign to the next another team member)
- for collaborating on documentation (using saved drafts)
- to track holidays/leave (using discourse-calender)
- for system alert monitoring (custom plugin to port alerts as topics into a private instance)
More details on some of the above in this blog post: How Does Team Discourse Use Discourse?