Overview

Blogs are increasingly becoming standard practice for business and internal communications. They not only open up and de-formalise leadership messages, but they give employees a voice. A company without a blog solution is missing out and being left behind. And no one wants that, do they?

As part of the Attini Social Suite, Attini Blogs makes employee blogging on SharePoint easier and more effective. It makes it just as easy for people to publish to your intranet as it is to write an e-mail. Discovering knowledge is easy, and sharing it even easier.

Attini Blogs is the one place people can go to find blogs and posts relevant to them, and it ensures that SharePoint can keep up-to-date with all the latest knowledge management innovation in the marketplace. Attini Blogs provides a number of blog template enhancements, a new blogging portal and a blog directory.

Blog template features

While the standard SharePoint blogging template provides all the essentials needed to get started, Attini has created a few important features to make it even better.

Attini Blogs ensures that SharePoint's blog template meets the expectations of bloggers more familiar with platforms like WordPress, Blogger and TypePad.

New enhancements to the blog home page template:

• Enhanced search box - provides results in a format that makes sense
• One-click e-mail subscription - makes sure people don't miss a post
• Summary views - provides quick access to the most recent and popular posts
• Information panel - provides information on the nature of the blog, the owners of the blog and their contact details
• Tag cloud - filters the posts within the current blog based on how they are tagged
• Blog portal link - ensures that people can find the overall blogging view within your organisation
• RSS enabled - you know what RSS is.

New enhancements to the individual blog post template:

• Real time view tracking - provides the author with instant feedback on readership
• Information panel - provides information on the number of comments, tags and age of post
• Related posts - shows any other posts that have been published on the same topic.

Blogging portal

Attini Blogs provides a new blogging portal where a configurable set of aggregation web parts create a place where people can see what others are blogging about.

With Attini Blogs you can make the knowledge people share more discoverable by creating views based on the number of comments or 'hits' a post has received. This way your most important posts will rise or 'bubble' to the top of the page. Additionally, Attini Blogs' advanced Tag Cloud and Tag List take SharePoint's tagging function to a new level, helping people to create compound filters which deliver posts only on the topics of interest to them. By including an RSS feed, they can be assured of never missing a post.

Blog directory

It's also important to be able to find the latest and most popular blogs and blog posts. Attini Blogs includes a centralised Blog Directory, containing all the blogs in your environment, their location, description, owner information, statistics and extensible metadata. The information in the Blog Directory is constantly updated and also provides a 'My Blogs' section, making it easy to find any blogs in which you have contributed.