Zoho Discussions - perfect solution for support forum

Zoho unveiled its anniversary (twentieth) service. It is Zoho Discussions - a solution for company forum. Zoho recommends to use this tool as a customer support forum, but you can also setup access rules and use it as an intranet forum for internal collaboration. Unlike the popular forum engines (phpbb, vbulletin), Zoho Discussion provides less features, but the functions that are important for customer support are quite powerful. Besides the solution setup (on your own domain) and administration is much more easier than in case with common forum CMS. The best way to see Zoho Discussions in action is to visit Zoho support forum, that uses the same platform.

Here are the main Zoho Discussions features:
- built in chat (integrated Zoho Chat)
- beautiful user profiles
- bookmarks and watch-lists
- private messages
- design configuration
- user rating
- widgets support
- spam protection
- powerful moderation tools
- vote for comments
- WYSIWYG editor
- file attachments
- sticky posts
- suitable search
- RSS channel for each forum

Some features are worth special mention. User can create 5 topic types: discussion, question, idea, problem and announcement. Each forum can be easily filtered to view only specific topic type. It's very suitable for example for support specialist, who wants to solve the latest customer problem, or for developer, who wants to analyze all customer ideas.


In "question" and "problem" topics users can select the "best answer". This post will be labeled to make the answer search more suitable.


Zoho Discussions allows to create 2 forums with 1 moderator for free. If you want to increase the number of forums, moderators, if you want to use your own domain, if you need more disk space, you'll need to pay from 25$ a month.