Most of EA's clients are IM/IT industry professionals.
Instead of having to search through threads in a discussion group to see if anyone else has reported a bug, or suggested a feature, I'd prefer to see the list of bugs and feature requests compiled by the Sparx's team from these discussion groups, as stored in your internal bug/request tracking system.
I could then see which requests Sparx's has taken note of, and for Bugs, I could easily find out if the Bug was previously reported, or better yet fixed, assigned to be fixed, or a suggested work around.
If that isn't possible, giving the community more formal tools for posting and searching requests and bugs would allow us to more easily find existing bug reports, and feature requests, so we could find, or submit information on resulting solutions, workarounds, etc. It would also allow us to self moderate, guiding each other on how to submit concise and meaningful bug or feature requests instead of these omnibus discussions.
JIRA, Bugzilla and Mantis come to mind. I'd suggest Sparx's host the solution so at the very least you'll be able to cross link your internal tracking solutions to reference the external comments of the community.
If you want to limit users, set it up so only registered EA users can submit features and bugs to the new solution, but make it readable by all.
