Intranet Blog\Forum software for business use

I'm interested in setting up an Intranet blog/forum application for work.
The idea is to have people in the office blog about projects they are working
on and problems they are facing. We will still need to have a site moderator
that approves the blog entries prior to posting. And we would also like to
be able to control the access level of the viewing user to determine which
posts they may view. I have been developing asp.net apps for several years
with IIS...I have a good idea of how I would implement if from scratch...but I
would like to avoid reinventing the wheel. My schedule is pretty tight at
work and I'm trying to find application template to avoid creating this site
from scratch I have heard that PHPBB is a popular choice...but I don't have
any experience with it. I would also like to be able extend the application
with custom asp.net controls if possible. I have heard that
CommunityServer.org might be a good option but it is only free for
non-commercial use. Our software budget is tightening at work so adding
new costs is not going to be popular when we don't have an absolute need.
Someone had mentioned share point however I wasn't sure this would really get
me a head start on this application. I have team addition for developers so
I suspect that I may already have access to a good tool for the job.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated,

Jeff

On Feb 16, 7:50 pm, JeffDotNet <JeffDot...@newsgroups.nospamwrote:

I'm interested in setting up an Intranet blog/forum application for work.
The idea is to have people in the office blog about projects they are working
on and problems they are facing. We will still need to have a site moderator
that approves the blog entries prior to posting. And we would also like to
be able to control the access level of the viewing user to determine which
posts they may view. I have been developing asp.net apps for several years
with IIS...I have a good idea of how I would implement if from scratch...but I
would like to avoid reinventing the wheel. My schedule is pretty tight at
work and I'm trying to find application template to avoid creating this site
from scratch I have heard that PHPBB is a popular choice...but I don't have
any experience with it. I would also like to be able extend the application
with custom asp.net controls if possible. I have heard that
CommunityServer.org might be a good option but it is only free for
non-commercial use. Our software budget is tightening at work so adding
new costs is not going to be popular when we don't have an absolute need.
Someone had mentioned share point however I wasn't sure this would really get
me a head start on this application. I have team addition for developers so
I suspect that I may already have access to a good tool for the job.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated,

Jeff

You can try WSS (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, it is a free feature
of Windows 2003)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sh...726561033.aspx

For approval in WSS you would need to create a workflow.

My development box is a
P4 1.7Ghz
With 512MB of RAM

Do you have any other recommendations?

Steven,

My development box is a
* *P4 1.7Ghz
* *With 512MB of RAM

It appears that WSS 3.0 will not run on my development box. *It should be
fine on my production box. *Would I be able to develop on my laptop running
XP? *

Do you have any other recommendations?