I've already been working on something like this in my dev environment.

Something like this would definitely allow Cerb4 to compete with a hosted solution such as TenderApp. The only advantages I see of TenderApp over Cerb4 at the moment is the "public discussions" - basically public tickets that can be assigned/closed, and suggestions from the KB when submitting a new ticket or starting a new discussion.

RD in chat asked about this today. Add a +1.

I really don't think Cerberus should be developing a forum which is a full project in itself, when there are already many capable forum software products out there, and meanwhile the helpdesk itself has plenty of rough edges and more-mainstream features to focus on?

Issues which seem a bit more important and dare I say even more urgent like CHD-2067 for example were already bumped out of 5.3.

I'm afraid this feature would either be a very poor attempt compared to the sort of well featured forum software users are used to (like phpbb, vb, simple machines etc.) or extremely time consuming to produce. Maybe there's some scope to integrate with one of those options somehow... but which one, and also of course how to avoid the maintenance headache each time there's a new forum version released?

Actually the other way around. To my knowledge, IP.Board (http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/) can authenticate users against an arbitrary source, so one option to get this functionality with today's Cerberus system would be to simply connect them up.

IF (when?) Cerberus allows LDAP authentication that should give the possibility to do this same sort of thing on a broad scale (i.e. with almost any forum software you like). That way you get a decent forum system and a good level of integration between helpdesk and other parts of your site (e.g. forum).