Like anything, it depends. For organized, hierarchical, detailed discussions forums work well. For quick, short messages the journal might do either in general or within a group.

I've had issues on sites that have implemented both group forums and group journals where user's don't know what to post where. I've generally found keeping forums out of groups (and on their own) to work out better.

Finally, our team is moving away from forums entirely to a Q & A model (our own, not DNN's) as we feel most of our technical users find forums to be harder to use, find, search for specific answers to technical questions.

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Steven Webster
Manager, Community Platform
F5 Networks, DevCentral