My Strategy For Changing The Forum Application

Here is my strategy for changing the forum application. 

• Research the alternatives - done
• Implement one or a couple to test/prove features, compatibility, security - done
• Build out the features and settings for a candidate so it is a 80-90% complete - in progress
• Run the candidate in parallel with the current forum so no quick decisions need to be made. The candidate forum will be hidden, or not publicly accessible. 
• Invite a select few of the more active forum users to evaluate, make suggestions, ask questions. This will also build a lot of content so everyone can get used to the interface
• Once there is a consensus, or at least no show-stoppers, present the new forum to the entire Board of Directors who will ultimately want to take a vote. Moving forward will very much depend on the support of the active forum users in the community. 
• If the BoD approves, spend the required resources (time and money) to migrate the post history of the Asgaros forum into the new forum. Then present the new forum to the entire Sidecar community with the reasoning and rationale. 
• At some point, with both forums functioning, we will need to turn off and eventually delete the old Asgaros forum application, ideally with all the old posts successfully imported into new forum application. 

Put simply: Crawl, then walk, then run. Bring people along so there are no surprises. Don't make decisions in a vacuum. The potential downside to this is there will be a lot of noise and friction about the change. 

Jerry