It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of our of first enterprise product for SharePoint.
Blog Central
I have had the great pleasure of working with a small group of early adopter customers on the functionality and feature-set and we have now matured it to the point where we have a V1.0.
While writing and designing software like this is obviously something I enjoy immensely, what I’ve enjoyed even more is watching blogging take off inside the enterprise. This experience has convinced me that providing people with a platform upon which they can share their knowledge, their experience and in the process grow their reputation, is where the real innovation in Knowledge Management is going to come from over the coming years.
If you are wondering if a blogging platform, built on SharePoint, could help people in your organisation share their knowledge more effectively, answer this one simple question:
Is it as easy today for people to publish a web page to the intranet as it is to write an email?
If the answer to that question is no, then 2009 is about time it became that easy. Email is the enemy, the ease of email is what is keeping knowledge locked away, and blogging is the alternative. It makes it easy for people to turn what through email, is an answer for one, to an answer for everyone.
For me, its useful to think of keystrokes as a non-renewable resource.
What would you do if the world were running out of keystrokes? How can you maximize the benefit of every word you write? The benefits should be clear to everyone. By sharing your knowledge you make others better, you make the organisation smarter, and of course, you are able to grow your own reputation.
Blog Central is the first in what will be a range of solutions designed to make SharePoint better at connecting knowledge and people. If you would like to know more, take a look at our demo site here:
Blog Central: http://demo.zevenseas.com
Or contact hans@zevenseas.com
Key Features
The following section describes the key features offered by Blog Central.
Post Aggregation
- Blog Post Home Page page where people can see what people are posting across the entire organisation
- Tag Cloud representing what people are blogging about and providing a quick filter
- Ability to sort blog posts based on number of:
- Comments
- Views
- Published Date
- Support for RSS feeds
Provisioning and Directory
- Provides a place where people can request a new blog (with approvals)
- Blog directory supporting custom metadata
- Ability to sort blogs based on total number of:
Search
- Specialised search page designed to make it easier to find blog posts
Blogs
- Based on the Standard SharePoint Blog Template
- One click email subscribe/unsubscribe
- Information panel that displays the blog owners, posts, views and comments.
- Included support for tags on blog Posts, and a blog specific Tag Cloud
- Web parts that display “Most Recent”, “Most Discussed” and “Most Viewed” posts.
- Detailed and customisable View tracking