Need some guidance for J1.7 move.

Sorry about the vague title.
I'm looking to move a site from J1.5 to J1.7 shortly.

The site has paid membership - a manual process as the number of memebers doesn't warrent a CB subs install.
Also it has Virtuemart and Kunena installed.

Rather than just migrate over and have the same set up on 1.7 I was wondering about exploiting GroupJive to give a better user experience.

Current non-members that purchase from the shop don't get a site membership.
So I was thinking of letting shop customers register and then give them access to post in a small part of the forum and put the paid members in a GJ group that gives them access to the whole forum.

Does that make sense? and is it the best approach?

Does that make sense? and is it the best approach?

Well given you don't want to use CBSubs it's going to be a bit more complicated. GJ doesn't grant access to all of Kunena. It only grants access to the individual Groups forums. If using CBSubs however this would be quite simple and wouldn't need GJ as you could simply protect Kunena component or individual Kunena categories via By URL Part protection. Please see the below page for what GJ can provide as well as a demo link.

www.joomlapolis.com/cb-solutions/groupjive