Don't you love it when some other department comes up with an idea that they can't implement, so they drop it in your departments lap? Well it happened to my boss, and he decided to drop it in my lap as I seem to have become his "special projects" worker bee (yes make those quotation marks in the air).

Basically we have some new products come out, and with them alot of changes in procedures and information. To try and make for a smooth change-over they want us to pull a message board with integrated IM service and NT authentication out of a hat!
The only thing they are throwing into the hat are the external company project cost, so they are even requesting us to pony up a server and do the admin after it all get implemted.

I've been looking at Infopop's UBBThreads and vBulletin, and checking for some suitable hacks or add-on that they have available.
But are there other packages that offer the features I have mentioned? or at least the flexibility to add them?
It would be an option to use two separate products.....but this would probably increase the implementation time (read: my time).

Oh, with regards to the IM side of things, there cannot be any client side software required - just to increase the fun factor

Anyway I figured someone here would either be able to point me in the right direction or tell me that I am completely off my rocker.

Thanks guys and gals for taking the time to read this.

sounds exactly like something my boss would ask me to do. Or at least some other department would ask my boss to ask me to do.

I'm pretty sure there are IM capable forum apps. I run Ikonboard and it has IM capabilities but not really realtime. More like an ICQ thing where you only get notified of the message when you refresh or click to another section of the forum.

As for NT authentication, I think they might be asking a little too much there. Especially with a web-based (php, perl, cgi, etc) forum. I could be wrong, but I think it's even hard to find any app out there that uses NT auth that either not by Microsoft or from one of the larger popular companies that probably work directly with M$.

I could be wrong there, but I assume it's near impossible to code your own app using NT authentication and almost as hard to find some ready-made app/plugin to integrate with your app.

I don't know anything about MS Authentication, but I thought I'd throw my suggestion in.

I've been using phpBB2 all this summer and have been amazed by its quality. It's not as easy to configure as it is with a full control panel in something like UBBThreads, but it's still pretty darn easy, and it's free of course.

There doesn't appear to be an official chat function yet. However, there are people out there actively creating mods and add-ons to the board, of which I've installed quite a few. There appears to be several developers of chat programs or chat interfaces for the phpBB software.

leftyfb, I think I understand what you're talking about in Ikonboard, but that's certainly not a chat. That's more like the private messaging function. Sort of like memos in an inbox. Plus, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you can only carry on a "conversation" like that with one other person.

That's another thing, are you requiring a two-member chat, or a chat room? Do you have to have multiple chat rooms?

Anyway, phpBB continues to amaze me in its value. I had UBBx with Infopop hosting for about a week. I hated it, it was insanely expensive, and just not worth it. It was also slow. phpBB has been quite fast, is completely free, and in my opinion is a better program all around than the UBB. Hell, I'm sorry to say it, but I like it better than this board software. But that's mainly because I never use threaded mode.

The biggest problem sounds like your Windows auth problem. I could be totally wrong, but if youre using 2000, isn't Active Directory an LDAP server? And, if so, couldn't you do LDAP auth instead of trying to deal with native Windows authentication?

well i spent the day setting up the basic demo package of UBB.Threads, it took the day because I'm very impatient when it comes to reading help files

and got it working, well sort of, I was unable to corner our netadmin to get the SMTP server details, so I just have a nice pretty looking forum with no users or topics

I'm not completely off my rocker with regards to 'authentication' as a search of www.ubbdev.com returns 18 hits, with this post grabbing my attention. So there does appear to be some way around it, just how much of a hack it is I won't now for another bit.

anyway, thanks for the sympathy and words of support. It nice to know that my company does not have a monopoly on id10ts