Products: Enterprise Blog Engine

Blogs (short for “weblogs”) have become a communication and collaboration phenomenon on the Internet. Bloggers play a key role in numerous Internet communities and communication flows – in politics, news, technology, entertainment, etc. Clearly blogging facilitates knowledge exchange and collaboration on the Internet. The key question is: can it play the same kind of role within an enterprise?

We believe it can. But to do so, an enterprise blogging engine must have some very different capabilities and features than a traditional public blogging tool. Based on our research with large and small enterprises around the world – both corporations and governments – we have designed an enterprise blogging engine from the ground up to meet these precise needs of organizations.

  SearchScience Research Highlights

Despite the buzz and hype that surround blogging on the Internet, blogs are not a well understood as a communications medium inside enterprises. In our research we have uncovered a number of questions that an enterprise blogging solution must answer. For example:

• How do you know you are getting business value from blogging within the company?
• Is blogging really that different from email?
• What kinds of incentives do I need to put in place to encourage internal blogging?
• How do we avoid frivolous or inappropriate blogging?
• How do we balance the self-expression aspects of blogs with legal considerations?
• Are blogs equally important in every part of the business, or should they be used more selectively?
• Can I administer and monitor all blogging in my enterprise from one administrative console?
• How do we bring together blogging and findability?
• Should corporate document deletion policies apply to blogs?

  Differentiating Features

The SearchScience Enterprise Blog Engine has been designed from the ground up to enable blogging within organizations. It includes a number of differentiating features that are not available in consumer-oriented blogging tools:

• Enterprise taxonomy-enabled blogging and posting – ability to classify blogs and posts as relevant to a specific business process, location, organization, community, product, project, or other identifying business category
• Enterprise blog administration – ability to set up, monitor, and administer all enterprise blogs from one central administrative console
• Editorial workflow for “edited blogs” – enable editors to manage submission, review, and editing of blog entries prior to posting
• Multi-level blog security – control over ability to see, post, or comment in blogs, based on multiple membership criteria (workgroup, community, organization, region, job type, etc.)
• Application of corporate document deletion policies to blogs, posts, and comments
• Ability to identify internal experts based on blogging and posting activity
• Personalization via user profiles to streamline tagging and classification of blogs and posts
• Integration with existing corporate LDAP directories
• Flag and/or disallow language in a post that might be offensive or objectionable in a business context
• Complete and seamless integration with Enterprise RSS, including “home page” alerts and notifications of blog subscription updates
• Support for multiple language postings – ability to save and present text in different languages, double-byte language encoding
• Seamless integration of blogs and posts with Enterprise Networking Communities
• One-click blogging (posting) from a web page or MS Office document
• Ability to automatically post blog entries on a Microsoft SharePoint Portal
• Support for “guest” logins to enable anonymous blog posting (can be switched on or off by enterprise administration)
• Built-in rating and feedback system – ability to rate bloggers, blogs, or posts (customizable)

  Engine Technical Specifications

Search Science applications employ a modular and extensible architecture to support secure, scalable and reliable services. The Search Science Engines are designed to integrate smoothly into existing IT infrastructure.

• Integrates with existing Security IT LDAP/Active Directory Infrastructure
• Easy to use and maintain
• Deployed on Industry standard J2EE Application Servers platforms
• Supports META Blog API
• Supports Caching for frequently read Blog Posts
• Supports Webservices SOAP based API for Blog publishing
• Works with existing SMTP/POP messaging infrastructure

  Hardware Requirements

PC with 1 Ghz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 800MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system); Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended

• 1 gigabytes (Gb) of RAM or higher recommended
  (512 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
• 1.5 gigabytes (Gb) of available hard disk space
• CD-ROM or DVD drive

  Software Requirements

OS	:	Microsoft Windows 2000 Windows Advanced Windows 2000 Windows XP Pro
Database	:	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Oracle 8i/9i
Application Server	:	JBoss 3.x/4.x WebLogic 8.x/9.x
Java	:	Sun JRE 1.4.x