RSS feedsOver the past two or three years, there has been something of a sea change within the realm of corporate communications. The top-down, hierarchical model of memo and newsletter is on the slide, with a set of less formal tools that encourage open debate and instant feedback starting to take over. This creates a more personal engagement inside the enterprise, and reaches beyond to customers and clients.
Business has been quick to make the most of news aggregation services and podcasting (which we will look at in-depth next month), as well as blogs and wikis, and by this association comes more general approval. No wonder, then, that libraries, universities and research facilities are also embracing these new communication tools.
Blogging can no longer be treated as simply a medium for providing those with nothing to say somewhere to say it. Citizen journalism is now a recognised and valid new media genre, and one the serious researcher cannot afford to ignore. That’s not to say that dross isn’t out there, but as an information professional your skill is in discovery and filtration.
Yet nor should the value of the blog as an information distribution tool within your enterprise be overlooked, assuming that the information concerned lends itself to an informal and chronologically based format.
Wikis, on the other hand, can almost be thought of as an extension of blogging – a classification-centric medium allowing for the free-form manipulation of content across a community of users. By engendering user enthusiasm and commitment, wikis are tools for generating ideas.
Wherever there is a need to cascade knowledge that can later be further refined, a wiki is fit for purpose. Unsurprisingly, it’s within the world of the information worker and knowledge facilitator that wikis are at their most powerful, enabling information archives to be built at speed, yet without compromising the authority of the content.
UserLand
Blog creation and publishing
www.userland.com
Cost $39.95 (£22.50 ex Vat) per year, per desktop
Radio UserLand may appear less visually attractive than, for example, the Six
Apart blog offerings. It is firmly rooted in real-world functionality first and
foremost. This should come as no surprise once you understand that its
developer, Dave Winer, pretty much invented blogging and maintains the oldest,
continuously updated blog on the web
(www.scriptingnews.com),
which has been running since 1997. The UserLand portfolio actually comprises two
products – Manila and Radio UserLand. Both are easy to use, yet neither
sacrifice advanced features for this worthy cause.
Perhaps best known for the Radio UserLand desktop tool, and suitable for personal and business use alike, is the server-based Manila product used by academic institutions and government agencies. Its popularity is due in no small part to its scalability, multiple authoring support and advanced automatic archival and indexing features, coupled with the ability to establish editors and departments for collaborative applications in a wiki-like fashion.
Manila is a true content management system at heart, but by adopting the blogging model it manages to release all the power of idea sharing and project management, without the need for IT staff intervention.
Working equally well with either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox web browser clients linked to the Manila content management server, Radio UserLand will also enable users to create, manage and publish blog content directly from the desktop. Indeed, think of it as a fully blown desktop-based web server, taking the strain out of one-click publishing of updates. You can either drag all your content, files, documents and images into the appropriate folder and let the UserLand client automatically publish everything within, or use a clever scan feature to search for the updated content within selected folders and publish whatever it finds, again automatically.
For sheer flexibility, it is hard to beat. It has it all: from a ‘mail-to-blog’ function for updating via email, the ability to choose whatever archiving frequency suits your level of activity, from daily to monthly, all the while maintaining postings within their original categories after they have been archived, through to a track-back spam filter to help keep public-facing blogs clear of the spam menace.
With everything from the built-in news aggregator, which makes posting news
items on your blog a two-click process, through to the ability to syndicate your
own content using automatically generated XML-driven newsfeeds, it is designed
for professional content management functionality. The yearly subscription model
includes a meagre 40Mb of storage space; however, you will need to budget extra
for additional 50Mb storage blocks (costing £22.50 ex Vat per unit).
Pros One-click publishing; intelligent archiving; content
syndication
Cons Only 40Mb storage space by default; looks dated; no spell
check
Windows Live Writer (Beta)
Blog creation
http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com
Cost Free
It’s not yet out of beta, but we could not ignore this desktop blogging software
from Microsoft. Although there is an obvious link between the blogging software
and the consumer-focused Microsoft Live Spaces as a blog publishing service, it
isn’t an exclusive partnership.
Indeed, Live Writer works well with other third-party services, including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress to name a few. It also supports multiple blogging engines simultaneously, should you have more than one blog to manage.
Live Writer follows the Microsoft tradition of WYSIWYG publishing applications, bringing a level of publishing professionalism into the blog post-creation sphere, without ever impinging upon usability.
Live Writer knows, for example, the styles of your blog involving its headings, fonts, colours, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes, and so allows you to edit your post using these styles. But it also knows that sometimes you may want to view the HTML source code behind a post. And it is relatively clean, unlike when you let Word convert something to HTML, or even preview what it will look like online before you publish it. It makes these modes available as well, both of which can save a lot of time in the otherwise laborious publish-refresh-review-edit-republish cycle.
We were impressed with the way Live Writer handles images within a posting, providing contextual editing tools for modifying size, text wrapping and even applying limited graphical effects. Importantly, you can also specify a thumbnail alternative for normal viewing, linking to the full image when clicked. It should be noted that photos can only be uploaded directly to a blogging service if they support the neeMediaObject API, otherwise you will need to bring an FTP server into the equation.
One of Live Writer’s rather unique touches is the ability to insert maps from the Windows Live Local map service directly into your blog post. This can be customised to change the view (road/aerial/birds-eye) and add pushpins (including custom links).
If it lacks a feature you would like, the chances are someone else would like
it as well. Thanks to the Live Writer SDK, its capabilities can easily be
extended by developers creating plug-ins. There are already plug-ins available
to add Technorati tags, insert an FTP file or interact with Flickr services. It
opens a new window for every post, which can soon pile up, but with user
feedback that may be ironed out during the beta process. However, it is
available now, perfectly stable and free.
Pros Ease of use; WYSIWYG; map/image handling; extensible
multiservice support
Cons Window handling; still in beta
Six Apart
Blog creation, management and publishing
www.sixapart.com
Cost From £2.66 per month
Six Apart and blogging are pretty much synonymous, having embarked on a
well-structured acquisition trail over the years to the point where it now has
every aspect of blogging covered, from the individual to the biggest of business
needs.
The Six Apart portfolio includes LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) at the personal blogging-cum-social networking end, TypePad (www.typepad.com) sitting firmly in the professional individual to small business blogging space, and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) serving the needs of the enterprise-level blog publishing platform.
LiveJournal is a free, hosted blogging service – a cross between a blog and a wiki, thus creating a social networking platform. Think of a community of interconnected blogs, with friend lists determining who can comment on blog entries and which postings you can view summaries of from your home page.
Free accounts are available, but professional users are best served with the £10.75 annual subscription to get advanced customisation and mobile working features, including posting via email or mobile phone, and the ability to embed a blog into your own web page. Movable Type starts at £21 for a single classroom educational license, rising to £150 for a 10-seat commercial license.
With support for unlimited blogs, creating one for each project, client or workgroup is easy, while retaining central administration over them all. Yet for such a corporate-strength product, the extensible interface is easy to use, with point-and-click controls for both creation and management functions. The only downfall is the tricky installation.
This leaves TypePad nicely positioned as the everyman blogger in the Six Apart stable. It’s easy to use, has a subscription level to suit every pocket and requirement, and allows unlimited blogs on your own domains, including collaborative blogs with advanced templates and 10Gb of bandwidth per month. And all of this for a mere £80 per year.
All subscription levels offer access to numerous templates, but pro users get the added advantage of being able to customise just about every aspect of those templates, even editing the style sheet or using the advanced template language for advanced users.
And because TypePad uses a true WYSIWYG editor, there are no surprises when
you publish your blog postings. In addition, publication can be scheduled
automatically in advance. Management features are well implemented, especially
for comments and conversations, which can be monitored for feedback. Offensive
keywords can be blocked, as well as offending posters by URL or IP address, and
comments can be restricted to users signing in with the Six Apart authentication
service.
Pros Something for everyone
Cons Confusing array of choices; one service does not fit all
WIKIS
Confluence
Wiki
www.atlassian.com
Cost From £342
Confluence is a cross-platform, Java-driven enterprise wiki, requiring the help
of the IT department to install and get going. However, once installed it’s an
easy application to use at any level. From the end-user perspective it’s easy to
master, as every wiki must be for productive collaboration. Just don’t confuse
its simplicity with a lack of power.
Revolving around a central model of spaces, you create as many as you like and populate them with as many pages as you like. Users can be granted access rights to a space and then individual pages within it, which can vary from basic read-only permissions to full editing control.
As you would expect of a product aimed squarely at the enterprise market, security functionality is well implemented. The editing experience is also richer now, mainly because of the additional power that has been brought right into the editing window. Without leaving this you can add images, attach files, perform batch renaming of pages and even perform searches for page links. All pages, comments, blogs and attachments within any wiki are searchable.
We particularly like the whole spaces model, which allows for multiple linked wikis, and the news function, which enables you to have a blog in every one.
Confluence 2 has seen a host of new functionality brought into what was already a market-leading application. The introduction of a true WYSIWYG rich-text editor is one good example, as it enables quick switching between this view and the traditional (and often rather confusing) wiki mark-up view, without needing to refresh the page. There’s also a full undo/redo function, which will invariably come in handy.
Confluence has also added an autosave function, with a configurable default of 30 seconds, to ensure you will never lose much work if disaster hits.
The dashboard has been much improved, with the list of spaces now divided into four tabs to show all, favourite, available team and new workspaces in the one view.
Labels can now be added to categorise content within Confluence beyond the rigid hierarchy allowed by spaces and parent-child relationships between pages. And an RSS feed builder is included to allow users to create their own newsfeeds based on personal criteria, supporting both RSS 2 and Atom formats.
User management issues have also been tweaked with the addition of a new
Atlassian-user management library, which allows for integration with an external
user base, making full integration with an LDAP directory server as easy as it
gets.
Pros Ease of use; security; attention to detail
Cons Installation is not for the feint-hearted
Project Forum
Wiki
www.projectforum.com
Cost From £26
Described as a best of both worlds wiki solution, CourseForum Technologies is
keen to emphasise that while this is a server-based product, you don’t get the
server-based hassle. Although sceptical, we downloaded and ran the Windows
executable file (Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD users can also play along) and it
really is a self-contained, self-installing wiki server application. You don’t
even need special hardware; as long as you’ve got an internet connection, you
can run it from your desktop PC.
Likewise, if you want it, there is a fully hosted version, which does away with the server requirement altogether, but unfortunately this also does away with the great value proposition as well.
Instead of a pay-per-user model, you get a pay-per-group one. And with prices starting from £11 for a single group and 25Mb disk space, it soon adds up. As with most next-generation wikis, ProjectForum generates RSS feeds based on new entries automatically, so you don’t have to wait until you visit the wiki to find out about them.
The nature of RSS being device-independent, this function shouldn’t be underestimated. Getting new entry notifications on your PDA or mobile phone means you are never far from the latest information. However, the absence of Instant Message support, or rather the ability to alert you to the fact that other group members are within the workspace, is a drawback, though, which is surprising considering that both Confluence and SocialText do support IM.
New to this latest release is support for MP3 playback (which baffles us a little), improved activity logging and noticeable performance tweaking.
We like the ability, at least on the full version, to group project areas together inside the main wiki, which CourseForum calls sub-wikis. It’s also much easier than most to customise the whole thing with a view to corporate branding. Instead of having to hack scripts and risk breaking it, or rely on noncompany-specific templates, ProjectForum builds the process into the application.
If you need enterprise security and power, but don’t have enterprise-level technical know-how, then ProjectForum is hard to beat. The anyone can do it philosophy extends throughout the product, from installation and deployment to wiki editing and management.
From the easy browser-based interface and easy page creation, to the
easy-to-learn markup for page formatting and easy installation, it gets a tick
in all the right boxes.
Pros All the enterprise power, and none of the enterprise
installation hassle
Cons No IM support
SocialText.org
Wiki
www.socialtext.com
Cost Free
We like the fact that when you are editing a page, a list of all previous
versions of the same page are available. A single click on any of these is
sufficient to open it for a side-by-side comparison.
Because wiki content is driven by constant collaborative revision, it’s also simple to reinstate any of these older pages should you consider them to be more appropriate than the one you are working on.
All SocialText pages can be subscribed to as an RSS newsfeed, enabling automatic notification of any page changes – handy if you’re not in the office at the time, as is the ability to add new pages by email. The message title becomes the wiki page subject and the message body itself the page content. This works, but it’s not ideal because pages created this way aren’t linked to from existing ones, although it is published on the recent changes page.
As with Confluence, you can also blog within SocialText, and because these pages display all comments chronologically, it makes for a good basic online discussion forum. If you assign your wiki pages a category or more in keyword tagging fashion, all the pages within that category can then be viewed on a blog page.
The latest changes to the interface have been in response to feedback over the years, and address mainly issues of navigation and organisation. This has been done by separating the navigation experience from that of reading and writing, and the introduction of a personal dashboard feature has helped achieve this.
What was formerly know as workspace navigation has morphed into a shared bulletin board, but it serves much the same purpose in providing a method for team leaders to create signposts for team members. But new users are not the only ones who will appreciate the dashboard; power users as well should love the ability to get an instant overview of all activity across a busy wiki.
SocialText covers the full spectrum of pricing options – from a personal edition for small teams and free for up to five users, to a full-blown, behind-the-firewall, enterprise-level product that will cost upwards of £5,000 for setup and training, plus a per-user charge on top of that.
The middle ground is nicely covered by the professional licensing, which
starts at £50 per month for fewer than 20 users and rises or falls accordingly.
Being a hosted system, you need only point a web browser in its direction and
start working, as the requirement for installation and training are removed from
the pricing equation.
Pros Use anywhere; email page creation; no bandwidth
restrictions
Cons Cost of the larger server-based enterprise version
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