Blogging Roller: Are you blogging at work?

Are you blogging at work?

Weblogs have been appearing all over the intranet where I work and I keep hearing about behind-the-firewall blogs at other companies. I've heard of folks who are blogging their weekly status reports, using blogs as personal notebooks at work, and creating newsfeeds for CVS, bug trackers, and other systems. Still, I get the feeling that most weblog-at-work deployments are experimental - just grass roots efforts to put weblogs in place to improve collaboration and communications and to see what happens. Am I wrong about this?

Traction Software sells "enterprise weblog software" and has put together an interesting list of weblog use cases, summarized below. Are you doing any of these uses cases? Are you blogging at work and, if so, what use cases are you finding most useful?

Traction Software's weblog use cases:

Personal Notebook
Scientific Research
Corporate Communications
Program Management
Product Management
Operations Log
Community of Practice
Internal News
Exception Reporting
Human Resources
Public, Investor, and Customer affairs
Account Team Communication
Law Firms and Litigation Support
Law Enforcement

Dave Johnson in Java • 🕒 01:34PM Aug 05, 2004

Tags: Java

Comments:

Yup, definately grass roots. I've installed Roller internally on a "back door" Linux server for my group. Not too many people are using it yet...namely myself. One other person posted on it, but found that the JSPWiki instance I installed suited her needs better. I'm not doing anything as fancy as some of these use cases, but perhaps I should be. Currently I'm just using it as a personal notebook. At one point I was posting meeting minutes, but no one was really interested in that. The real goal of using a blog in business is to reduce email bloat. For example, looking at the operations log issue mentioned. What if you could have your wallboard reporting report to a blog or a blog like thing that could publish an RSS feed. Then you could remove the hundreds of alert emails that support staff receives by having the RSS feed manage those ticket alerts. I for one would love to see it used for corporate communications. Why do companies feel the need to send out an email to thousands of employees saying the same thing, when posting to a blog with an RSS feed would handle the issue with less network traffic and less disc storage costs?

Posted by Mike Cornell on August 10, 2004 at 12:25 PM EDT #

I've just setup roller here at work on our new development hardware. I'm hoping to get everyone on the team to start using it for anything from Status Reports to Project blogs (wondering how to do shared blogs - maybe we can use categories and write a page to view all posts by all users for a category page). We have about 10 users so far! I'm hoping that it can be grass roots as grow bigger. At the least, me and a couple of others will be using it. I'm using SQL2k with roller and had a few hiccups with that install, but it's running pretty well now. It's a great product! Can't wait for the 1.0 release! Thanks, Ben

Posted by Ben Christen on August 16, 2004 at 11:52 PM EDT #