Six Apart takes blogs to work

Whether businesses are ready for them or not, tools for blogging are getting quite serious about the business customer.

Case in point: Weblog service and tool provider Six Apart this week is expected to launch two business-specific blog offerings. This official branding just adds an exclamation point behind a trend that was already in motion. Six Apart’s Movable Type is an integration-oriented publishing platform that many businesses — including Ford and Procter and Gamble — currently use. Six Apart also offers a hosted blogging service called TypePad.

Corporate workers are increasingly usurping blogs and wikis for collaborative efforts such as project management and bug tracking. And Six Apart isn’t alone in its quest for the suits.

Collaboration tools provider Near-Time later this month will launch a service that ties blogs and wikis into collaborative communities (see page 18); wiki provider JotSpot this week will launch hosted, prebuilt wiki applications for businesses; and iUpload last month unfurled a hosted service for blogs, wikis, and ECM.

Six Apart’s new offerings are Movable Type Enterprise, which gains directory integration, support for Oracle databases, and expanded and workflow; and TypePad Business Class, a hosted service featuring expanded storage and bandwidth, more robust administrative features, and SLA options.

“Business blogs are legitimate tools that can work the same way e-mail and IM have worked for businesses,” said Anil Dash, Six Apart’s vice president of professional products. Blogs can capture a lot of collaboration info that was once ephemeral, Dash said.