By now, everyone is familiar with blogs and how important they've become for sharing information, building community and so on. We could go further and say that for some purposes, using a blog is a much better tool for communicating ideas than using email. But that's a blog post for another day.
So OK, you're convinced and you want to dip your toe in the water and start a blog for yourself or your company. As you look around, you'll find hosted solutions like the one you're reading now. You pay a monthly fee and the hosting company takes care of the software, the servers and the bandwidth.
Or, there there is the popular choice Movable Type, for companies that want to deploy their own software. But what if, like many companies, you're Windows-centric. Sure, it's *technically possible* to install Movable Type on a Windows Server, but it's not Windows friendly. You'll quickly get (too) familiar with tools like MySQL, Perl, etc. Even then the "to-do" list is long.
There are other options for the Perl/Unix crowd as well, but for the Windows Server administrator, the only real choices are open-source, hobbyist type projects. A product called .Text (dot text) runs the blogs on MSDN and other sites. Another product called Das Blog offers similar features.
As I looked at this category, I was certainly surprised by the lack of fully-supported, commercial offerings for Windows. A commercial product called Community Server that is based on .Text should be shipping soon. But beyond that your choices are few.
Like most of you, I'm convinced that blogs are not this year's Pet Rock. They can make an important contribution to your organization's internal and external communication capabilities. The lack of commercial products for Windows seems like an opportunity for vendors. And I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't pushed more in this space, since Movable Type is not Microsoft-friendly at all. Deploying Movable Type is a reason to try Linux.
So, for the Windows administrator, don't make any strategic bets just yet. Dabble with a hosted solution or look at an open source option like .Text. Hopefully 2005 will bring an enterprise-ready, supported, Windows-centric solutions.
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There are also a couple of Lotus Domino-based blogging templates, and at least one provider (dominodeveloper.net) who will host personal blogs at low or no cost. You get all the enterprise attributes of the underlying Domino platform, and the flexibility to blog like any other blogging softare (with some niceties like offline blogging).
OK, OK, I’m biased…but Domino’s fairly typical content management capabilities have been well-leveraged in this space.
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Gotta start somewhere
Jeez, what do you do on your first post to a web log?
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