Sunday, August 20, 2006

An Article about Blogtronix, our technology and the Corporate Blogging business model

We have found a very interesting and positive article about Blogtronix and Blogtronix Enterprise Platform. Blogtronix Enterprise – our core Corporate Blogging Communication and Knowledge Management Platform had recently received a huge user and backend admin functionality boost and was accepted extremely well among existing and trial customers. Here is an interesting article published by Jerry Bowles in his Blog site:

Article direct link: http://www.enterpriseweb2.com/p=67_
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Ho, Ho, Ho. Blogtronix Has the Last Laugh.

To cop a conceit from Ira Gershwin, they all laughed at Vassil Mladjov when he announced last year that his (and George Athannassov’s) new company Blogtronix would be built around a .NET blogging and business collaboration platform.

Well, not everyone laughed, but many of the open source zealots and the-anything-Microsoft-does-must-be-garbage crowd sure did. Why would someone do something so safe and boring, they demanded to know? The answer is: Precisely.

Blogtronix was conceived from the ground up to be an enterprise social media platform that would integrate easily into existing IT enterprise desktop infrastructures, which are overwhelmingly Microsoft. Sure the big M is boring and proprietary and sneaky and all the things we love to hate, but CIOs are comfortable with it and they have spent years learning to manage Microsoft installations in terms of the only three things they really care about–security, reliability and scalability. Exciting and revolutionary are tied for dead last on the enterprise software priority list.

Mladjov, who spent 13 years working in company IT environments, clearly understands the conservative nature of that market. Blogtronix Enterprise, a secure enterprise blogging, wiki and corporate social networking platform, which is an upgrade of company’s core business communication and collaboration offering, is being unveiled this week at Digital Hollywood, a trade conference for digital media professionals. The press release pretty well says it all: Blogtronix Enterprise is designed to make blog and wiki communication as well as user administration easy for deployments with virtually unlimited users and workgroups.
Among the new features and tools:

- LDAP real-time authentication and single sign on
- Unlimited blog communities and groups
- Microsoft SQL Express support
- Rich Media WYSIWYG editor for Windows and Mac- Flash based video blogging
- Secure and private workgroups
- Integrated Corporate Social Networking
- Restore options for blog posts, comments and wiki
- AutoSave for blog posts
- Document management
- Integrated RSS reader
- Activity feeds and email alerts to users and administrators
- Powerful anti-spam protection with solid feedback management tools
- Client branding
- Usage dashboards
- Detailed blog and user statistics
- Integrated video tutorials

In short, all the groovy stuff laid on top of an architecture that doesn’t require much integration and has the control features IT guys really care about. Blogtronix is being aggressive about pricing, too, with an introductory price of $20 per user per month available through September. Blogtronix Enterprise is also available as an behind-the-firewall appliance starts at $10,000 plus monthly user fees.

Blogtronix may not be as “cool” as some of its competitors (or it may be, I haven’t tried it) but based simply on the .NET platform which leverages on Microsoft’s dominating position in the enterprise desktop arena, its acceptance so far, and its very competitive price, you have to think that Blogtronix will be a formidable–perhaps even dominant–player in the enterprise social media platform space.

Somehow, I suspect that just like Christopher Columbus in the Gershwin song, Mladjov is going to be the one having the last laugh.

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