Social software is web-enabled software that allows users to interact, share information and collaborative discussion.  Through the advancement of the Internet as a social medium, social software has seen a rise in popularity in recent years and will only continue to expand as web usage grows.  Thanks in part to the ease of use; forums are one of the most popular types of social software.  Forums are broken down into separate topical categories, referred to as boards where users can post topics for discussion.
 
Forums are an excellent way to share information, provide support, enable interactive discussion and solicit feedback from your users.  With the Groups module you will be able to create forums on your site to promote a socially interactive, information rich discussion environment.

Using the Groups module, forums can be setup with a diverse selection of boards to meet all of your needs.  Worried about inappropriate content being posted?  No worries with the Groups module, for each board you will be able to implement moderation (if desired); by choosing moderation an approved moderator will read all messages before they are posted.  Alternatively, if you do not select moderation then users may post messages without the need for moderator approval.  

You will be able to further define user privileges through the use of security roles.  Security roles can be defined independently for each board on the forums.  For example, if you have a General Discussion board, you could allow any user to view and post on that board.  If you had a board where you posted software updates and only wanted company employees to be able to post you could configure the security roles specifically for that board.
The forums come packed with most of the standard forum features you would expect (search, ranks, profiles, thread subscription, etc..) from any forum package.  Forums are a great way to communicate with your users and have never been easier than they are now with the Groups module!