There have been blogs about “Benefits of blogging”, “blogging” and “business blogging” but, for me, as an IT professional, a more practical aspect of blogging would be “How to setup a Blog?” I’ve not really thought about what options could be made available or how to customize a Blog or, if that is even an option? This comes up as a co-worker’s request for “a website where customers can share files (wiki or something similar)? I’m thinking about something that customers would get to log in to and then could view others code (.js) and objects (.wrl, .cmp).”
Of course, my response was maybe we should look at setting up a company Blog. It seemed to meet her requirements and with a company Blog I may get to like Blogging. Anyway, her comment after I suggested a Blog was, “I’m fairly confident I do not want a blog. Every blog I have visited is hard to read and I can’t find anything I’m looking for.” I have to agree that things seem to be scattered on most Blogs I have looked at however, I would guess that it has more to do with how a site is moderated / managed.
Of all the Blogs I looked at, this site, LotusUserGroup.org is by far the best organized. The site revolves around Lotus Notes and the Blog is based on BlogSphere which is an OpenSource Lotus Notes template. I am going to use this as a reference when I discuss setting up a company Blog.
This is a sample of the Left and Right side bars
Now I have a great example of an uncluttered Blog and it appears that I should be able to customize a User Group Blog for our company. There are a lot of free Blog templates available and they are customizable so I should be able to model a Blog after the Lotus Notes Blog. There is so much information on what you need to setup a blog as well as what kinds of questions you should ask, that, with a little reading (or a lot) and a little experimentation I should be able to come up with a plan.
I can’t think of any other options for setting up a User Group area that would allow our users to share information and files as easy as using a blog?
The only other thing I can think of off the top of y head would be something like Google Groups or Google Docs. Although I am not sure what the exact intention is for your company. I also believe that everyone may have to have an account with Google.
ReplyDelete