December 22, 2004
corporate typepadding
One of my clients lives 3,000 miles away from me.
Recently we’ve been working together a lot. Instead of zapping each other 50 thousand e-mails a day to each other, we set up a simple, no-frills Typepad blog, and we blog our thoughts and ideas there.
It totally rocks. It costs what– $10 a month? It works like an e-mail exchange, but it’s a lot smoother, somehow.
Typepad allows you to password-protect your blog, so only those you allow can read it.
Mailboxes are annoying.
With the blog, thoughts are much easier to organize, because they’re all on one single homepage– at the least the recent ones are.
It’s a great way of working.
Of course, now all Typepad needs to do is invent some sort of RSS-type aggregator, so if I start working more like this with other clients, it’ll allow me to manage all of my private client conversations in one single place without having to worry about all those different passwords and uswernames. And do the same for all my clients’ on their end.
Rock on.
Great idea!
But why not Wiki? Wouldn’t Wiki allow more flexibility in moving chunks of stuff around?
Hugh, b2evolution (www.b2evolution.net) would allow you to handle everything in one place. You would just add a new user for each of your clients and a new blog for each of those users.
It’s open-sources, so it’s not a matter of point and click like TypePad, but as a member of the development team, I’m sure the two of us could work something out to get you going. If you’re interested in demo’ing it, shoot me an email.
Hugh — give Lilina a shot — http://lilina.sourceforge.net/ — I’m using it to create a group blog, aggregating the RSS feeds from several individual blogs into one page.
It’s open source and pretty easy to use.
Corporate Typepadding
Hugh –
My company is completely distributed (40 engineers & artists across the US and Canada, clients around the world), and we use heavier tools than would be useful for you, but have you looked at Basecamp?
http://www.basecamphq.com/
If I were in your boat, it’s something that I would consider heavily. RSS and iCal syndication. I agree with you that email is the wrong answer (or it’s the right answer to a different question).
YMMV.
We’re working from Canada and the UK with clients and suppliers worldwide and have been using an MT installation with great success for about a year now.
Using blogs for small scale corporate communication rocks.
I’ll second that wiki recommendation. But then I’m biased.
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiBeatsWeblog
http://www.teamflux.com/
Oh, I’m sure there’s lots of neat stuff already out there.
The thing is, I’ve already got a relationship with the folks at Typepad/Six Apart and I’m already accustomed to their way of building things.
I would much rather Typepad build me something I want than go find somebody else who’s already building it.
Yeah. People matter.
Or, have a look at Canadian company silverorange’s intranet.
http://www.silverorange.com/a/intranet
bit like basecamp, but more conversational, project based with posted replies, more powerful than a run of the mill intranet.
“Yeah. People matter.”
I couldn’t agree more. Multiple blogs with multiple users and permissions for those users shouldn’t be that big of a thing — although you wouldn’t know it by the number of blog packages, opensource and commercial that don’t have it.
I’m sure they’ll be able to put something together for you, Hugh. If you ever want to give something else a shot though, just shoot me an email.
The wiki idea everyone’s been touting is a good idea, but I don’t know that it would be as easy as a blog for people to learn. There’s generally more to learn with a wiki than a blog. A blog is straight forward, goto admin, post a new entry, goto site, see entry. I know for the technical minded of us out there, wiki’s aren’t much different, but I don’t know that it would translate into being easier for the general population. Now, a blend of the two into a bliki type system might work (Google for ‘crossroads bliki’ for my thoughts on those).
concur on typepad usage hugh — i’ve used in for private weblogs supporting distributed teams and it works fine…
what it needs is some form of integrated identity management based on the blog(s) your interacting w/…
should be as simple to use as say bloglines, but w/ authn/authz/ldap complaince build-in and then integrated w/ the typepad rudimentary access control admin feature…
would definately help them make the leap from consumer to corporate blogging, if that’s what they desired of course
Great minds think alike. I use typepad for the exact same thing. It works great especially when you are working clients to help them to understand what the web can really do.
just one comment: thanks!
Let’s get beyond this crazy hard-wired separation between blog, wiki, email, IM etc. content types and create a network and tools that give us real flexibility in how we create and interact with stuff.
Rather than fix this at the server side, I use Trillian to pull all the feeds together.
It lets you check email, gmail, blogs (via RSS) and the following IMs: AIM, Yahoo IM, ICQ & MSN.
Agree with you, and Andreas, and all the other comments … tho personally Valdis I prefer blogs to wikis … a bit more ‘organic” somehow …perhaps because it displays more of the path to getting wherever it is the work is going.
Using blogs for small scale corporate communication rock
Exactly … another neat feature is the File Manager in blogging applications … you can just drag n’ drop all files you need for your business or work into the File Manager, and then you essentially have the business infrastructure … all the documents and works in progress … in one place. My colleague just learned the benefit of this one week ago when he had his laptop stolen out of the back of his car. All the files he needed / needs are still there in the (Blogware) File Manager.
Seems obvious that such tools in various configurations are so useful and easy … the future of (much) work ?
Signal vs Noise’s Basecamp does exactly what you want — starting at Free. IT has RSS, File upload/management, calendars, milestones, blogs and comments.
Manage all your “projects” in a blog format. Only those with passwords to those projects can get in. It has RSS, and I’ve been using it for ages for my clients.
Rocks.
http://www.basecamphq.com
This is truly great! Take it from the master of flawed argument