Well that is kind of a bummer. I love wordpress and use it on 3 sites, but only one is multi user. I think since multi user is supported with personal publishing being the main focus, perhaps in the future the multiple author portions of the code could be expanded upon to make collaborating between users a little bit easier. In the meantime we shall use the CJB Note plugin, not the best solution but it kinda sorta works for our needs. I will check out this forum plugin, perhaps if the address was not shared we could restrict it to authors only. If anyone thinks of anything else, please do let me know.