Hi Mary,
I was wondering if your differentiation between Using the Cloud for R&D Forums (4) and Access to Public Forums for Technical Problem Resolution (7) was a hard and fast differentiation or if you saw the 2 as melding together in some locations. I help run Community over at SolarWinds and see our ideation platform and our discussion groups as both R&D forums and as public forums for problem resolution. We have one cloud-provided community solution that, I would like to think, provides both. You can use the direct message and private discussion functionality on thwack.solarwinds.com to reach out to R&D, Support, MVPs, Gurus, Product Managers, and many others both SolarWinds staff and not.
We are always looking at ways to incent our members to help others and to provide insight and help, people might be interested in the points-driven store:
http://thwack.solarwinds.com/store.
This is a great post, and I look forward to your response and others' thoughts.
Thank you,
Michael
