Blogs, Wikis and feeds are internet technologies
that are starting to enter the enterprise world. Blogs are a way to simple
publish content, wiki’s are a way to easily collaborate on pages and feeds
are a way to access the content. A lot of these technologies are entering
the enterprise below the radar so they need to be made fit for business
while still easy to use. Policies and security should be examined. You
can also look at communities within your company to allow groups like ‘Sales’
to all edit the same areas.
Blogs are starting to make a very significant
inroads into the business. The first thing about a blog is that it must
be easy to publish content. An example blog on screen is Ed Brill’s blog.
Another example on screen is the Ford Motor Company, this blog however
does not have comments but it is still a valid blog.
Workplace Blogs : Tech preview available
on Alphaworks. Currently 2.5 but soon to see an update to 2.6
Wikis are not being used within IBM
as much as blogs but it does have a quick adaption curve. A wiki is a website
where anybody who can read the wiki can also edit the wiki. An importany
wiki on the web is Wikipedia but internally most wiki’s will not be as
large as Wikipedia. Wiki’s also contain revisioning tools to allow
you to stepback changes that may be incorrect.
Wiki for WorkPlace is currently in development
but has no current release date.
While Blogs and Wikis are used for creating
content Feeds are used to read the content or to be notified when new content
was created. feeds are also extending beyond their original context with
things like PodCasts, RSS calendars etc. The feeds are in XML in
a variety of flavours, RSS, Atom, OPML and RDF. IBM are going to be focusing
on RSS and Atom for their products. Atom does have a IETF ( RFC Standard
) while RSS doesn’t. Atom are also working on a publishing spec.
IBM have a goal to make sure that you
see Orange buttons everywhere for all products and pages. They are also
working, where possible, to integrate feeds into their products where suitable
for both publishing and reading. Workplace feeds will be integrated into
TeamSpaces, Document Libraries, Web Content Manager, WorkPlace Forms etc.
Basically anywhere where new information can be added will eventually have
an associated feed. There will also be portlets that can consume feeds.
There is also work going on in Domino.Doc,
QuickPlace, Domino and Activity Explorer to add feeds to them.
One interesting thingin the demo is
the ability to ‘Push Content’ to an external blog. This would apply
if an internal blogger also had an external blog then they can create content
once and have it published in two places. Saving time and making life easier
for those CEO’s who are starting to blog. They mention they are using
RSS to do this. I’m not sure why they don’t use the blogger api,
might be easier and would support more external services.
the Workplace Document Manager can also
read in RSS feeds like Podcasts, the system will pull in the enclosure
and add it to the library automatically for you.
My Summary : This session was very similar
in the first half to the session myself and Richard gave last year however
there was not as much technical information. More like a 10,000 ft overview.
When talking about RSS feeds they never went into any detail on how the
XML feeds are made up. Demo’s were pretty good but they never showed the
new Lotus Notes blogging template. The demo of the enhanced RSS feeds in
Workplace was pretty interesting.
Dec's Dom Blog 