@BrianOblinger makes a great point. In my experience, it takes a bit more efforts to certain stakeholders on these non-technical elements, and like Brian said, you want to make sure that the conversation is not limited "let's count the checkboxes" type of binary discussion. This can be a bigger challenge if there are very opinionated stakeholders with one dimentional IT/Operations point of view. Building a community partnership with a strong vendor is very different from buying cloud storage, and It helps to focus on overall value, vision, sucess stories/references and steer away fromh "$x will buy me y checkboxes" type of arguements.  ... View more

Lots of great tips. In addition to platform features, I'd also make sure sections on solutions, support / uptime SLA, security/spam control and services (moderation, professional services..etc) are included. Platform feature checkbox matrix is important, but it can also be misleading without verbose information in business values that can't be quantified in a binary checkbox selection. For example, many vendors do not offer terms-of-use moderation service. Depending on how big your community is, that may be a serious consideration which can impact your internal resources/headcount/budget.    Cheers,   ac ... View more