Blogs, wikis make a home in the enterprise

Blogs and wikis have moved past the tech bling phase and are settling in as core fixtures in the enterprise collaboration infrastructure. Two enterprise content management vendors are helping drive this evolution, bolstering their platforms with security and auditing functions designed to preserve the sparkle of blogs and wikis while making the content safe for the enterprise.

Stellent this week introduced new features in its Universal Content Management application for building blog and wiki sites on top of the Stellent Multi-Site Management platform. The company’s UCM gains a wiki linking feature, which uses double brackets to automatically create new wiki pages, and templates and workflows for wikis and blogs.

The informal knowledge and project management dividends that blogs and wikis deliver to corporations are being tempered by the security threat posed by the tools, according to Andy MacMillan, product manager at Stellent.

“Building [blogs and wikis] on top of mature web and enterprise content management, those concerns go away,” MacMillan said.

Stellent’s blog and wiki functions include LDAP and Active Directory integration, single sign-on, permission-based user views, a workflow engine, records management and auditing, and content reuse. UCM also is gaining expanded RSS support.

SaaS (Software as a Service) ECM vendor iUpload recently released its Customer Conversation System, which combines blogging, wiki, and ECM tools with security, workflow, and app integration. It features CRM integration, customizable approvals, content reusability, granular security and permissions, and versioning and compliance reporting.

The service includes iUpload Express, offering an implementation road map and best practices for helping newbies deploy blogging tools.

In adding blogs and wikis, ECM is “following the natural maturation that needs to occur for a market to morph so as to remain viable,” said Maurene Caplan Grey, founder and principal analyst at Grey Consulting. “Blogs and wikis are merely two more types of media that hold content.”