It sounds very much like Organik to me. We used Organik in our organisation for a while. It was based around communities and did indeed have discussion boards and also nominated experts who would answer questions. There was a rating mechanism and as questions were asked and answers given it would be stored in the knowledge base for future re-use. Another nice feature was that when anyone went into the system to ask a question - the expert would be notified via outlook. As an e-mail based culture this worked for our organisation. The software is still around and the company who own it are called Sopheon.
> > FWIW we used Organik to create and run the 'ask an > expert' service at > ICP (used > by the business links, businesseurope.com and - my > favourite - at > yourpeoplemanager.com). > > It was a total nightmare: resource hungry, difficult > API and, now owned by > Sopheon, rather expensive. However, if you use it > out of the box for just one > community then it's fine. > > FWIW our software person wrote a system from > scratch, based on his experiences > with Organik, and that worked much better for us. > > This isn't to slag off Sopheon, but rather to > emphasise that the real cost in > these systems is the initial configuration and > thereafter > user/database/process > management. > > If you need simple "ask a question, find an answer" > systems, perhaps with the > space for additional "knowledge" to be added (eg > "skills/info I used to solve > this problem") you'd be well advised to look at > (free) Unix software that's > related to software 'ticket'/problem solution. This > is a well known problem > domain and has the concepts of experts, questions > and answers, closing > a query, > time allocation, knowledge bases etc. > > While you'll need a friendly tech person to set > these up, they'll often have > their own faves they can share. Two I've used and > liked are FaqOMatic (ugly, > but quick and useful), GNATS (ugly, but has > templates and is great for a > distributed support system) and my current fave, > Trac > (http://www.edgewall.com/trac/). >
