Tuesday, February 26, 2008

List of tools for the internal blogosphere

We're all loving the increasingly rich set of tools and services that exist for the (external) blogosphere. But, as many companies start to allow employees to blog internally, there is a need (and an expectation) that equivalent tools will be available - after all, much of the power and utility in blogging comes from having these extra pieces of functionality available.

Unfortunately, either much of this is not in place, or it's all being kept very quiet. So, I'm going to keep track of internal equivalents to external tools and services in this post. Please leave a comment or email me and I'll update this post. Vendors - please feel free to email me or add a comment - I'm very interested in getting quick (less than 1 hour) and focused demos. Here's my starter list:

Internal only
  • blogging server software
  • Enterprise RSS platforms
  • social bookmarks / tagging [eg del.icio.us]
    • del.irio.us - perl based, very similar to del.icio.us
    • scuttle - PHP based - looks nice
    • dogear - IBM pilot social bookmark service - not available outside IBM yet.
  • technorati equivalent
    • None
  • Wikis
  • Integrated platforms
    • Community Server:
      • blogs, web based rss aggregator, internal blog aggregation, forums. I've been playing around with this a little, and it looks very useful.
      • There's a free and only slightly limited version available that would work well for small companies as well as workgroups or departments.
      • Paid for options exist, giving access to single sign on, Exchange Server connectors, load balancing, etc.
      • ASP.net based, source code included.
    • Elgg
      • Intended for the education community, this nonetheless looks like a powerful integrated platform - blogs, tags, social networks, feeds. I'll be trying this out as well - there's a showcase site at elgg.net
    • ThoughtFarmer - 'social software for intranets'. Wiki based solution that seems to cover off some of the required functionality of an intranet. Includes some social bookmarking and social discovery features.
    • Lotus Connections - IBM's recently announced move into the enterprise social space. Apparently integrates social bookmarking (dogear), blogs, social discovery and communities (forums ??). [
    • Intel SuiteTwo - I hesitate to add SuiteTwo into this category, as it's really a bunch of other products (Movable Type, SocialText, Newsgator, SimpleFeed) bundled together with some integration services from SpikeSource. Hard to see where the value is here.
Externally hosted that can work internally What else should be on this list - let me know.

Updates:

After Euan's comment, I thought it might be useful to add a list of hosted services that can be used internally, but don't afford a full internal experience (which some might say isn't a bad thing !). I guess my defining tests for being a true internal service are whether or not an internal RSS feed can be accessed, and where the "install" occurs - on a single server or on multiple clients (bit of a gray area I realise, with services such as last.fm)

  • 29th March 2006 - added Cogenz at Niall Cook's suggestion
  • 4th April - added Blogtronix
  • 23rd April - added Community Server
  • 17th May - added elgg
  • 30th June - added ConnectBeam
  • 13th August - moved Cogenz down to list of external tools that work internally
  • 29th November - added ThingsPrime.
  • 27th January 2007 - updated ConnectBeam, added Lotus Connections, Attensa, KnowNow ESS, Intel SuiteTwo.
  • 5th Feb - added in iUpload, and moved blogtronix to the internal platform category
  • 18th Feb 2008 - some minor changes - mainly for formatting
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