Considering the variety of products that exist on the collaboration marketplace nowadays, somebody looking for a knowledge sharing solution may feel overwhelmed. Or have a hard time distinguishing between the various types of products.
To make it easier for people to understand what Quandora, our Question & Answer product, brings to knowledge sharing compared to other tools, we decided to start a new blog post series: How is Quandora different from…
Episode 4: Forums
(Read Episode 2: Enterprise Social Networks)
Forums are web applications meant to manage user-generated content. Dating from the 80’s, internet forums have been a great start for the debut of online communities, by gathering people with different skills and background around common interests. A forum usually has a hierarchical structure, meaning that it contains a number of subforums that serve several topics.
Given the similarities of forums and a Q&A platform like Quandora, it’s only legitimate to consider the latter the direct descendent of forums. So I’d like to start not by emphasizing the differences between the two, but by talking about their likeness.
There are two important resemblances and two important distinctions that are relevant for the knowledge sharing activity:
Similarities:
Format: more or less, both use the same type of structure, even though Quandora offers a user experience that’s richer and more modern than what forums usually do. But you have a post or a question, followed by replies or answers. This helps users stay focused on the practical side of the discussion and participate with information in an organized way.
Structure: both use a tree-like architecture. As mentioned above, forums use subforums, just like Quandora uses Knowledge Bases. This way, you can set up different conversations spaces according to each user’s interest or expertise.
Differences:
Display: with forums, you always have a chronological layout, particularity that has a great impact on the content, because it’s less likely to find relevant information. Quandora offers viewing modes for each knowledge base. You can sort questions by 5 different parameters: newest, active, popular, unanswered and open.
Also, Quandora has some strong social ingredients: voting system and gamification. Once people start voting for a specific answer, the system pushes that answer up, thus facilitating finding the right and complete answer.
Follow system: with Quandora you can subscribe to whatever you find as engaging to your skills or interests: you can follow the whole knowledge base, only specific tags and even other users only. If you decide to follow the curation of specific users that you trust and let’s say three specific tags like “communication”, “testing” and “SEO”, you’ll have a custom content that will be displayed to you, according to these options.
That’s not a common feature with forums – you’d have to browse inside the subforums in order to find these specific data.
And I didn’t mention that most relevant difference, directly related to our main concern, knowledge sharing. Just like in the case of mailing lists, ESNs and wikis, the answer a user is searching for is most probably there, but it’s buried in the thread. So it becomes time consuming to browse through all the content in order to get to the specific information that you’re looking for.
To conclude, the forum is the closest to Quandora a solution can get. While forums are great tools for debates or general discussions, a Q&A platform is more efficient for very specific and particular situations. And the advantage of Quandora is that its format also allows users to use it a brainstorming space, as well as to find fast solutions to explicit situations.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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