Enterprise Weblogs
First, a personal note on enterprise weblogs. This last week, I was experimenting with Bloglines to see if it could be used to find business-related articles and place them in a blog. However, in some cases, after a link to the article was placed in the blog, the link wouldn't work afterwards. Still investigating.
Now, let's turn to Traction Software:
Traction is the leader in Enterprise Weblog software, delivering an easy to use platform for departments, groups and individuals to communicate, share, organize and link business information in context....
Traction's TeamPage software is a powerful, affordable solution to pervasive working communication and information handling pains found in business and government organizations of all sizes. Where there is a need to communicate or manage information, there is a need for Traction.
Traction TeamPage is robust and flexible enough to match your security, authentication, file management, and other enterprise requirements. Deployable to groups ranging from two to several thousand, the Traction platform is easily applied to solutions ranging from a group blog or intranet site to specific business requirements such as competitive intelligence and program management.
Traction Software provides top notch technical support and professional services. Though not required, our training and professional services programs can kick start and support a successful Enterprise Weblog deployment.
Traction Software then links to a Gilbane Report that discusses enterprise use of both blogs and wikis. Here are a few excerpts from Lauren Woods' article:
It would be difficult to find anyone who spends time on the Internet, or indeed who reads newspapers, who has not heard of blogs. Wikis are less well known, though Wikipedia, the free online collaborative encyclopedia is helping to change that....Most of the discussion about blogs is centered around their affect on mainstream journalism, their power as a new communication channel and voice of the people, and how this will impact society. All this is interesting, but what does it have to do with implementing content or knowledge management, or enterprise collaboration applications? IT, business managers, and even analysts can be forgiven for thinking “not much”....
But, being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments....
Executive Summary
Blogs and wikis are flexible practices and technologies that are increasingly being used within companies and organizations to ease the creation and dissemination of information, as well as making it easier for companies to communicate effectively with customers, partners, and the public. This article discusses some of the salient features of blogs and wikis, and give examples of companies who already have implemented one or more of these systems.
On speaking with several vendors and users, it is obvious that many companies are implementing blogs and/or wikis or hybrid systems successfully and I expect this to continue as the technologies and practices mature....
It is important to bear in mind that using a blogging system doesn’t mean the pages produced need to look like a blog. The traditional blog has dated entries arranged in a reverse chronological order, uses categories sparingly, and is written by one person to reflect a personal view. These are conventions that are supported but not mandated by blogging systems in general, although of course less flexible blogging systems may not support other uses in a graceful way....
The most obvious use of blogs in the corporate world is where an employee of a company writes their thoughts on issues, just like with the traditional personal blog, but with the added twist that they also write about their work and the company they work for. The Economist wrote about Robert Scoble of Microsoft in their February 10, 2005 issue, heralding the death of traditional PR and calling him a celebrity blogger. There are other companies where the CEO or President writes blogs to explain their thinking to the world, and I expect the trend to continue. Companies have realized that they need to explain what they do to the world, and they also need a forum to find out what their customers, partners, and investors think....
Blogging systems are so easy to use that many companies use them as a web publishing system. It’s easy to take a blogging template, rework it to remove the “blog” features such as date and author listings, and set up a reasonable stylesheet. The result looks like a regular web site, but it’s much easier to use than traditional HTML editors. An example is the Seattle Children’s Hospital Events Calendar at http://www.seattlechildrens.org/home/calendar.asp. The blogging system allows the easy addition of new items and automatically creates the RSS feed, and the result doesn’t look like a traditional blog....
Currently much information flows via email. This leads to a number of problems, including the difficulty of “occupational spam” where people are copied on email messages they don’t need to read, and the missing email where people are left off the list that do need to read it. New people don’t have the necessary background, and people who’ve been around for a while have hundreds of unnecessary emails languishing unread in folders. Over-eager spam filters (including a human who is overwhelmed and clicks the delete button too quickly) are a big problem, as is the problem of simply missing a message in the hundreds that people receive each day. Having centralized information sources with RSS feeds solves this problem. The reader subscribes to what they want to subscribe to (or, as befits the enterprise context, what they are allowed or required to subscribe to) and is automatically notified of new content. RSS readers can download all the updates to the local machine for offline reading, just as for email. And spam is taken care of at the content provider end, not the reader end. A further advantage is saving time. It is much easier and quicker to read an RSS feed from 50 projects than to go to the websites of even 20 projects to see if anything new has happened. Since RSS readers flag the new items, the reader doesn’t even need to wonder whether they’ve read this item before or not, the technology takes care of that for them....
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