Don't you love it when some other department comes up with an idea that they can't implement, so they drop it in your departments lap? Well it happened to my boss, and he decided to drop it in my lap as I seem to have become his "special projects" worker bee (yes make those quotation marks in the air).

Basically we have some new products come out, and with them alot of changes in procedures and information. To try and make for a smooth change-over they want us to pull a message board with integrated IM service and NT authentication out of a hat!
The only thing they are throwing into the hat are the external company project cost, so they are even requesting us to pony up a server and do the admin after it all get implemted.

I've been looking at Infopop's UBBThreads and vBulletin, and checking for some suitable hacks or add-on that they have available.
But are there other packages that offer the features I have mentioned? or at least the flexibility to add them?
It would be an option to use two separate products.....but this would probably increase the implementation time (read: my time).

Oh, with regards to the IM side of things, there cannot be any client side software required - just to increase the fun factor

Anyway I figured someone here would either be able to point me in the right direction or tell me that I am completely off my rocker.

Thanks guys and gals for taking the time to read this.