Separating Node Forums as thier own Nodes for sorting by Views...

Ok, I may be going about this wrong, but I am fairly new to Drupal... so forgive my ignorance if this is easy...

I am building a company website where we are using forums...
Container = Department
Forum = Their forums - for instance: News and Updates

I'm using views to take the most recent forum topics and post them to the front page... but I need to separate the forums so I can have only the News and Updates forums post to the front page, not the other forums.... even more so, I want to create a different view for each department's news and updates...

I know I can do this using taxonomy, but that is going to be to difficult for the employees to understand and its guaranteed they will not use it properly.

Is there a way to auto assign a Forum to a specific taxonomy term
Ex: If the forum is called "Accounting News and Updates" it will be put under the Taxonomy "Accounting News and Updates"

or separate the forums to their own node types, so that I can easily sort them in views?

I've searched and searched the site for the last 2 days, and come up with nothing....

Thank you for your help... Drupal is absolutely incredible, nothing else comes close... I am amazed at all the genius that has gone into this cms.