Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"?

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@wal

In the workplace, I also see a lot of competition from Microsoft Teams, believe it or not. They have a “forum” style interface built in, which is downright awful, but its also connected to your company’s IT interfaces and other MS products, along with the video calling features. I keep floating the idea of a Discourse forum for internal use, but the lack of the extra integrations leaves it unfeasible.

I find myself in this space too. Teams can do a pretty reasonable job as a ‘forum’ in a smaller environment (say 100 users or less), but really struggles when things get big - or if other MS tenants are involved.

@wal

Nobody at work wants yet another account they need to manage on yet another company website. Perhaps if there was some way to have Discourse embedded more closely into the company’s internal infra, it could make headway there.

Well, there is DiscourseConnect for exactly that.

And Microsoft links work perfectly well from Discourse (once you train people to get and post them).

Meetings

Meetings and emails are (like them or hate them) a central facet of corporate life. Discourse can do some elements of them brilliantly, but there are some glaring holes when attempting to apply it to internal corporate environments - especially around meetings.

Personally, I believe that adding a few features to Discourse Calendar (and Event) - #458 by joo would address this and supercharge Discourse for this use-case:

1. Automatically insert events in appropriate users (email) calendars
2. Intelligently manage email RSVPs
3. Allow easy integration with a videoconferencing service
4. Improved event creation UI