I am truly confused by this. It seems to me a neat, but functionally useless feature.

There is FAR to much emphasis placed at CCP on the whole "Corp" concept. It is my understanding that the vast majority of corps sit at around the 10 member mark and never get any bigger. There are lots of explanations as to why this may be so, but I am pretty sure that the reason they don't get larger isn't a lack of forum options. The fact is that corp communication isn't generally an issue, and by the time it does become an issue, it isn't corp communications you are worrying about, but rather Alliance and Coalition communication!

The issue is this, if you are a corp that is using the CCP forums, you are going to have a harder time when you join an Alliance or Coalition. You can't share those CCP forums with your Alliance, you can't allow access to portions to blues or your Coalition members and worse, it locks all your data into a nice proprietary CCP owned data store and you can't easily access it. It is a good idea, but doesn't seem thought through.

The reality here is that we need tools to help communicate to the people we play with, and CCP doesn't seem to realize that "Corp" isn't the end all and be all of that definition. What I would like to see is a standard permissions system. Use the user as the user object, Alliance/Corp as your first groups (make it so you have custom groups as well) and adopt a rights model like Exchange with various user roles and permissions. I want to be able to share my cache of fits with more than just the people in my corp.

This goes much further.. I want ways to integrate Jabber into EVE.. I want ways to integrate TeamSpeak and Mumble. A competent alliance will have Forums, Jabber, TeamSpeak/Mumble all tied into an auth system that assigns permissions based off API and checking against standings. That is just the BASICS. I really want CCP to realize that there is significant out of game IT resources required to create and maintain a functioning Alliance in EVE, I would like to see CCP dedicate some resources to reducing that over-head.

I don't see this as helping as it replaces a fully functional, if complex and difficult, system, with one that is crippled in the very ways I need it most (Auth and sharing info outside of just the corp level). I applaud the effort, I just think it could be better spent finding ways to make all those services play together better, and more easily integrate with EVE.