Comparing Enterprise Blog Software

Note: Keep in mind that this information was published on 2005-08-05 - a lot has changed with what used to be called enterprise blogging software. These days, blogs, wikis, groups, forums, misc., are referred to as social software applications or web 2.0 technologies.

The days of cheap blogging are over. As it becomes more visible - and expensive in terms of both time and money - supporting it with informal budgets and borrowed resources just won't cut it anymore.

Keep in mind that software (30%) is only part of a solution. We use a custom version of  Drupal (open source) to help customers implement enterprise blogging systems. The core of Drupal provides an excellent framework, like most open source projects, for starting out. But, it gets to be challenging (scaling and performance) adding non-core modules/plugins/widgets. You really need to know what you're doing, both with the software and managing a community for this stuff to rock.

We have been actively using Drupal to create online communities, collaborative tools, and enterprise blogging systems for over the last three years.

We take a hybrid approach between open source, closed source, functionality, risk and support to deliver simple or advanced, custom solutions. Ones that are stable with superior performance and maximum uptime.

Robin Good, Group And Multi-User Blog Platforms Compared

Comparative Report

The report puts head-to-head Silkblogs, Drupal, Manila, 21Publish, Typepad
and Wordpress, MT.

Here's info on Movable Type: Powerful enterprise blogs.

Drupal correct score is 10.5 (out of 11), which makes it the best scoring tool overall, above Manila (score: 9.5 - only when used with the Userland Radio Community server) and 21Publish (score 9.5).

Enterprise blogs should have all of these features and functions:

• user administration,
• advanced and group publishing, revision control with rollback,
• security for publishing internally (inside the organization) and externally (what the public sees and commnets on)
• workflow management, multi-threaded discussion capabilities within blogs, wikis, forums, group chat
• private messaging,
• trackbacks on all external posts
• auto discovery of internal links
• full wysiwyg (WIZ-zee-wig)
  editor for posts and comments (configurable)
• news aggregation on topic and keyword,
• metadata functions with controlled (taxonomies) vocabularies
• tagged - folksonomies (internal and external)
• hooks and links (API's) to 3rd party services (del.icio.us, technorati, flickr, et al). These API's are important to weed through - recommendation engine - the "conversational mess" to find and discover ideas that are revelant to your task at hand.
• XML/RSS publishing for content sharing purposes.
• Granular permissions and role based privilegeson all posts for view/edit/change functions
• Forums - Archives - Surveys - Polls - Webforms
• Support for a diverse range of projects, from simple blogs and wikis to large community-driven meeting places with hundreds of blogs and e-commerce.

Note: Some of these features/functions we have developed. 

The beauty of Drupal is that it is open source, which means you can do whatever you want with it. So depending on what your goals are, Drupal might be perfect for you.  For us, it serves as an excellent platform to help companies connect people, places, and things, to ideas and information, which leads to improved individual and business performance. As with any enterprise application, implementation, that is, getting people to use it for the intended purposes is always a challenge. If you choose to go it alone, there are plenty of ideas and information here on non-technical issues and loads of technical information on the Drupal forums.  

Note: We support e-commerce in our enterprise blogging platform not so much to sell external products (you can), but as a way for organizations to hold auctions for internal resources. Ross Mayfield has an interesting post from the Collaborative Technologies Conference in NYC that covers ideas from Thomas Malone, author of "The Future of Work". ("Intel Scenario: internal market for manufacturing capacity. Plan managers sell futures for producs they could produce at specific times in the future, Sales people trade it to be able to sell to external customers, prices fluctuate as knowledge of supply and demand changes, prices determine which products actually get produced in the factories and who gets to sell them. Could this let them produce faster, cheaper and better matched to demand? Enable greater profitability and innovation?" ...read more about Malone.

Corporate Blogging Gaining Momentum from CIO.

"Blogs are starting to become a business phenomenon," said Charlene Li, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, in her recent report called Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal?