Most on the list are open-source apps. Midgard is a popular PHP tool. Bricolage on the Perl-side.

Although MT is not listed, I do consider blog-like apps to be micro content management systems, and if additional features are added to a blog app, it can satisfy the CMS needs for many. Chapter 8 in the book “We Blog” or at the blogroots.com website is helpful.

Here’s another open-sourced workgroup blog app:
http://www.realizationsystems.com/

Scoop, used to power kuro5hin.org, is an app I’m interested in learning. I think it can be used as a CMS app for internal companies.

But don’t think of blog apps as just CMS tools. I believe they can also be used for knowledge or information management systems. When workgroups are posting to their area of the intranet, valuable knowledge can be accumulated. A new person to the group can read the workgroup blog.

If an Intranet app allows each user to maintain their own personal work-oriented blog or journal the way Scoop does and YAWNS (search Freshmeat), this can also become a valuable source of information.

We all collect web links for tutorials, white-papers, etc. A person in a software workgroup that’s just learning PHP or .NET, can do a search across everyone’s personal work-blogs and find information that reduces their learning curve, provided experienced programmers have been logging things such as code snippets, “gotchas”, websites, useful books, etc.

At my last company, I maintained my own work-blog with Greymatter. I then wrote community and personal-based blogging tools that worked within Plumtree. When I left, I gave the keys to my blog to my manager. I blogged upgrades, problems, fixes, ideas, websites, documentation, meeting notes, e-mail messages, anything I thought useful to my job. With a search function, it was easy to find out when I made that upgrade, or how was that problem resolved last time.

I agree 100% with your article. Nice job. I’ve been banging my head against this wall for two years with my “former” employer. I tried, in vain, to get people to publish content in much simpler ways.

For two years, I have been programming with and administering Plumtree at my last employer. Plumtree is an enterprise information portal. It’s not good for CMS, but they provide a CMS add-on at an additional cost, of course.

Another area of my former company began implementing the Gauss VIP content management system. I got a taste of that system last fall. I documented over 20 steps required to post a simple announcement or press release. Gauss has to be the poster child for unnecessary complexity in an Intranet tool.

It was suppose to allow other people to post content without requiring IT. Not so, as you mention in your article. It’s so damn complex and hideous that IT will be involved in posting content.

I resigned from this company a couple of months ago, so I can focus on developing my own community blog app that I will target to small businesses and non-profit organizations as a CMS/KMS tool.

There is a company proclaiming to offer “Enterprise Weblog” software:
http://www.tractionsoftware.com

Traction does contain some interesting features and ideas.

Anyway, like you say in your article, big companies with big budgets will spend big dollars for complexity. If it doesn’t cost zillions of dollars, and if it doesn’t take a team of programmers 12-18 months to implement, then big companies don’t want it.

I will not waste my time trying to break through that kind of thinking. I believe smaller businesses with limited budgets will be more receptive, provided they can see the value in the application.

A couple of sites I read that provide insight into the CM and KM arenas:

http://www.cmswatch.com
http://steptwo.com.au/columntwo/
http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog/

Here’s someone else’s experience with implementing a blog at work.

http://www.rklau.com/tins/stories/2002/11/11/klogPilotRecap.html

Finally, here’s an interesting idea for implementing a low-cost knowledge managemant weblog or Klog.

http://www.highcontext.com/Articles/howto/Low-costKlogNetwork.php

As we know, blogs are popular on the Internet. Maybe more blogging is occurring behind the firewalls, and we are just not aware of it, but I doubt it.

I think Blogging will follow a path to the corporations similar to that of Linux and Open Source software. It starts out as something useful or as a hobby at home and on the public Internet, but it creeps into the companies as people see how valuable the app is.

Here’s a good article about blogs as a disruptive technology within companies.

http://www.webcrimson.com/ourstories/blogsdisruptivetech.htm

Seriouslly, I should point out that the CMS system I am talking about was really an add-on to an overall bigger deal, but it is a hot topic for me because our CTO was very passionate about the vision of what could be.

I don’t have any input for you on open-source CMS solutons, but I will look forward to reading on your site about the direction you go. Good luck to you.

Besides MT, what other CMS products do you find intriguing? I ask because I’ve managed to get approval to use open-source in the creation of a new intranet portal. Any thoughts? And yes, we’ll look into MT as well.