[John James Jacoby]

Technically, yes. To take advantage of BuddyPress forums for 1.1.1 and how they work “out of the box” that’s what it needs. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so to create groups and map their forum_id’s to your old forums in phpMyAdmin.

When you upgrade, be sure to choose the “existing forum” method so that BuddyPress knows to use your existing tables and doesn’t create new ones.