Blog tools tackle content management

Deploying a full-blown ECM (enterprise content management) system to address basic corporate content publishing and workflow needs has been likened to trying to kill a fly with a rocket launcher. A more suitable solution may lie in souped-up blogging tools, which by design simplify content publishing.

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Speaking at the Blog Business Summit earlier this month, DL Byron, principal at TexturaDesign, a blog design and consulting company, said blogging tools are very effective ECM systems in certain environments.

"What is happening on corporate sites is companies are looking at blogging tools as an alternative to [Microsoft's] SharePoint, especially when they combine a blog engine with a wiki," Byron said.

New business blog tools include Version 3.2 of Six Apart's Movable Type, rolled out earlier this week, and SurgeBlog 1.0, an enterprise-class blog server being released next week by newcomer NetWin.

Other tools making waves in the space include open source content management and blog software offerings Drupal and WordPress, and a blog and wiki publishing platform from Five Across.

According to Stephen O'Grady, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk, many blog tools are essentially stripped-down content management systems and some have begun adding features for more complex content-control needs.

Blog tools "have basic [content management] capabilities and those are slowly becoming more sophisticated in terms of features like granular permission management and workflow," O'Grady said. Furthermore, many enterprise buyers are questioning their need for expensive and monolithic ECM applications, he added.

Six Apart's Movable Type Version 3.2 adds a system overview feature designed to aid administration of multiple blogs, according to Anil Dash, Six Apart's vice president of business development. In addition, a new context-sensitive search feature knows where a user is in the application and allows search-and-replace of any item across multiple blogs. Version 3.2 also gains automatic filtering of comment or trackback spam and can delete spam after a set period of time.

NetWin's SurgeBlog 1.0 is a full enterprise blog server, which includes a Web server, a database, e-mail server, and a management interface, according to Ralph Pugmire, managing director at NetWin. SurgeBlog also offers blog templates, team permission and security settings, and automated archiving.

Pugmire said the system scales to support as many as hundreds of thousands of user accounts.

The next version of SurgeBlog, due in the next few months, will add additional templates for building a variety of Web pages, Pugmire said.

Molly Holzschlag, another speaker at the Blog Business Summit, said companies are starting to look to blogging tools and related software for management of mass amounts of content, which is very important at the enterprise level.

The blog tools that businesses are discovering are high value, said Holzschlag, a well-known blogger and Steering Committee member for the Web Standards Project.

For ECM, "you may want to look from the bottom up instead of top down," Holzschlag said. "Very large content management systems are very expensive and hard to manage. The leading blogging tools are giving you great code --high quality and standards based code --" for a fraction of the price.