Bringing Blogs to Big Business
Today, a new partnership was announced between Automattic, a company that hosts and supports WordPress blogs, and KnowNow, an enterprise RSS vendor. The two companies are launching a blog platform built for the big business market called KnowNow Wordpress Enterprise Edition.
According to the company’s press release, KnowNow will act as a vendor, selling hosted WordPress blogs while extending the basic support and functionality offered by the service. Richard MacManus, in an interview with Automattic CEO Toni Schneider on Read/Write Web, says that KnowNow will offer bundles of WordPress blogs along with LDAP connectivity, spam blocking software and a stats tracking package.
The KnowNow Wordpress Enterprise Edition is only available to pilot customers right now.
Automattic runs WordPress.com, which offers a hosted service — complete with support and consultation — for the open source WordPress blog tool. It’s similar to TypePad.com, the hosted blog service offered by Six Apart that’s built with their Movable Type blog platform.
In fact, KnowNow Wordpress Enterprise Edition also bears similarities to a similar enterprise blogging package from Six Apart called Movable Type Enterprise 1.5, which was announced in October. Six Apart’s platform comes with Oracle connectivity, LDAP and some administrative add-ons.
Big corporations are working on what KnowNow calls their "customer facing presence." Business are not only using blogs to interact with customers, but they are also harnessing the use of blogs as viral marketing tools that can get customers excited about products and services while they’re still in development. Microsoft is one particular example of a company that’s benefited from encouraging its employees to blog about the product development stage.
So, there’s definitely a race going on to get the Fortune 1000 set blogging. The two enterprise products may be signaling the next big turn in blogging as it’s adopted by businesses. Blogs are easy to start, but running 1000 blogs in a large corporation can become a nightmare. It appears that KnowNow has the know how to handle the scalability problem. Does Six Apart?
Enterprise folks are notoriously slow to adopt new technologies, especially something like blogs, which many people in big business still see as "dangerous" and uncontrollable. Hopefully, this shift towards enterprise self-publishing will improve the speediness with which businesses react to customer demands.
It will also be entertaining to see how many businesses hop onto blogs without fully understanding the secret ingredients that make them unique — right before they fall on their faces.
