Baanboard.com has sprung to life at the start of the summer 2001. Tired of having to research multiple websites when looking for an answer to any particular Baan software problem, we decided to setup our own bulletin board. Yet another bulletin board? Yes and no! Yes since we are not the first message board to emerge on the web for 'baanfans'. No because we believe our message board offers many advantages over the already existing bulletin boards:

• superior web interface
• superior back-end technology (Linux, MySQL? , PHP and Apache)
• better daily management of the board

In September 2003 we complemented the site by providing a *Wiki*-based documentation site where Baan users, professionals and vendors can easily share valuable information in a more structured manner.

The final goal of our efforts is to provide a non-profit website where all people involved with Baan software (users, consultants, developers, recruiters etc) can share questions, answers and ideas that will help anyone involved in the Baan community.

The message board offers many advanced and powerful features such as:

• Powerful database-driven search engine
• Unlimited Forums / Messages / Categories
• User email notification of answered posts
• Support for smilies and vB Code
• Lost password auto email form
• User profiles (editable by user)
• Unlimited number of moderators per forum
• User groups - give select moderators/users admin powers
• Private forums
• Word censor facility
• Ban users based on IP address or email address
• Integrated private messaging
• Posts since last visit are marked so you can tell at a glance whether there have been new posts in a particular forum
• Moderation queues on posting and registration - check new posts before they become publicly viewable and new registrants before they can post
• ....

The Wiki offers easy, flexible yet powerful features to rapidly generate efficient documentation:

TWiki is a mature, full featured web based collaboration system:

• Any web browser: Edit existing pages or create new pages by using any web browser. There is no need for ftp or http put to upload pages.
• Edit link: To edit a page, simply click on the Edit link at the bottom of every page.
• Auto links: Web pages are linked automatically. You do not need to learn HTML commands to link pages.
• Text formatting: Simple, powerful and easy to learn text formatting rules. Basically you write text like you would write an e-mail.
• Webs: Pages are grouped into TWiki webs (or collections). This allows you to set up separate collaboration groups.
• Search: Full text search with/without regular expressions. See a sample search result.
• E-mail notification: Get automatically notified when something has changed in a TWiki web. Subscribe in WebNotify.
• Structured content: Use TWiki Forms to classify and categorize unstructured web pages and to create simple workflow systems.
• File attachments: Upload and download any file as an attachment to a page by using your browser. This is similar to file attachments in an e-mail, but it happens on web pages.
• Revision control: All changes to pages and attachments are tracked. Retrieve previous page revisions and differences thereof. Find out who changed what and when.
• Access control: Define groups and impose fine grained read and write access restrictions based on groups and users.
• Variables: Use variables to dynamically compose your pages. This allows you for example to dynamically build a table of contents: include other pages; or show a search result embedded in a page.
• TWiki Plugins: Enhance the TWiki functionality with server side Plugin modules. Developers can create Perl Plugins using the TWiki Plugin API. Some example Plugins:
  • ChartPlugin: Create charts to visualize TWiki tables.
  • SlideShowPlugin: Turn TWiki pages into web-based presentations.
  • SpreadSheetPlugin: Add spreadsheet formulas like $SUM($ABOVE()) to TWiki tables.
  • more...
• Application platform: Developers use the TWiki platform to create web-based applications. The TWiki Variables, Plugins and Plugin API offer a rich environment where domain-specific applications can be built efficiently. An example application is the XpTrackerPlugin? which allows teams to track Extreme Programming (XP) projects.
• Templates and skins: A flexible templating system separates program logic and presentation. Skins overwrite template headers and footers; page content is unaffected.
• Managing pages: Individual pages can be renamed, moved and deleted through the browser.
• Managing users: Web based user registration and change of password.
• What's new: See recent changes of TWiki webs. The change log can also be exported in XML RSS format for news syndication.
• Statistics: Create Statistics of TWiki webs. Find out most popular pages and top contributors.
• Preferences: Three levels of preferences: TWikiPreferences for site-level; WebPreferences for each web; and user level preferences.
• Topic locking: Users are warned if a page is being edited by an other person. This is to prevent contention, e.g. simultaneous page editing.
• Referred-By: Find out back-links to a page.
• ... plus other features not listed here.