IBM Puts an Enterprise Spin on Blogging -- ADTmag

IBM Puts an Enterprise Spin on Blogging

By ADT Staff
July 18, 2005

IBM has released two new blogging tools with features geared to the enterprise.

The company has posted Weblog Preview on it alphaWorks site for developers for Workplace 2.5 and Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5. The Weblog preview takes advantage of Workplace infrastructure to provide features important to blogs in the enterprise such as integrated search, security and roles plus application templates. Having a single point of control to administer Weblogs and other Workplace components saves time, money and worry, IBM says.

“The internal use of Weblogs at IBM has skyrocketed,” says Ed Brill, a sales lead for Lotus and Domino at IBM. Brill, a well-known blogger, says IBM has “10,000-plus internal Weblogs, of which 3,000 are active.”

The Weblog Preview allows bloggers to create a list or blogroll of favorite Weblogs so that readers can see what the blogger finds of interest. Bloggers can put links to either external or internal bogs in their blogroll. In addition, the Weblog Preview provides both an Atom and an RSS syndication feed so readers can subscribe to their favorite blogs using a preferred feed reader. Other features include Rich Text editing, search, comments, perma-links and archiving.

IBM is also releasing a blog development component with Workplace Designer 2.5 in August. It’s a fully built blog component that can be deployed to Workplace or customized by developers. Built with Workplace Designer, the blog sample is one example of what developers can do with the latest addition to the Workplace family of products, IBM says.

IBM Workplace Designer is an Eclipse-based development tool on par with Lotus Domino Designer. The new IDE has form and view creation, scripting, debugging, workflow and other features programmers would expect to see in an IDE. Workplace Designer 2.5 enables developers to build integrated, customized apps and save time by reusing components through the composite application structure.

For Notes and Domino developers, Blogsphere for IBM Lotus Domino R5/6, an open source project, is a Web Log application that allows Domino developers to create and run their own blogs. Another popular resource is DominoBlog.There have been almost 2500 downloads of Blogsphere since it premiered in November of 2004, IBM says, adding that there 100 blogs devoted to Workplace and Lotus software. More information about Domino blogging can be found at: Developerworks.