Hey Andrew,
Thanks for your reply. So the case is that our employees are not happy with the forum solution, because they are not interested in seeing or getting notifications about answers that don't concern them directly, or that are not of general interest.
The employees get a daily digest with all the forum content/topics and it simply doesn't make sense to them to get info about the personal info some colleagues want to send to the person who started the conversation thread.
We considered asking the employees to simply send a private message in Moodle, but that can go wrong for the receiver, when they receive all sorts of messages that are out of context, and not under a common topic. Plus it's an extra step in the communication flow that we want to avoid.
A suggestion would be to add an extra functionality to the forum, so users can choose: 1.if only the person who started the thread can see their message 2. everyone can see the message 3. or select a group of people to see the message.
Thanks,
Felicia