Web 2.0 Company SixApart Releases New Blogging Tools

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, July 12, 2006; 01:42 AM

Six Apart, provider of blogging software and services, released an upgrade to its flagship business blogging tool Movable Type and announced availability of Movable Type Enterprise with priority customer support in the United States. The company also announced summer price discounts across the entire Movable Type product line, while making its free personal license open to unlimited users with unlimited blogs.

Six Apart's General Manager of Movable Type, Nobuhiro Seki, said, "With these new products we continue to widen our lead in business blogging. The upgrade to Movable Type 3.3 demonstrates that we've been listening to our customers and responding to their needs. There are dozens of breakthrough innovations and significant improvements to an already great product. Movable Type Enterprise is far and away the obvious choice of very large organizations looking to improve internal communications and knowledge sharing at a fraction of the cost of traditional collaboration and content management systems."

Movable Type Enterprise is designed to make blog and user administration easy for deployments with hundreds or thousands of users, and to enable efficient content discovery, content aggregation and blog activity monitoring. With its extensible application architecture and many tools for improved information mining across blogs, Movable Type Enterprise allows for deploying company-wide blogging solutions.

Features exclusive to Movable Type Enterprise include:

-- LDAP authentication

-- Oracle 10g database support

-- Cross-blog publishing and aggregation tools

-- Increased Administrator controls over customization of user interface

-- Activity feeds allowing administrators and authors to be automatically notified about blog activity

-- Integrated password reset capability

-- Administrator-level search features

-- Powerful anti-spam protection with solid feedback management tools

-- Compatibility with the existing range of Movable Type plugins, templates, and APIs

-- Customizable email integration

Priority customer support, including a tested and proven escalation process and two-hour response time to high severity incidents, is available to Movable Type Enterprise customers annually for a percentage of the license fee.

"Blogging has quickly become an essential part of enterprise communication infrastructures, and the combination of Six Apart's enterprise blogging solution with Oracle Database 10g is perfectly adapted to the needs of today's global enterprises," said Kevin Walsh, Senior Vice President, Research and Development for Oracle Asia Pacific. "Blogging helps groups communicate across departments and geographies and capture critical information that complements enterprise applications."

Movable Type 3.3 and Movable Type Enterprise include such new features as:

-- Tag Support: Easily discover posts by topic

-- Tag Feeds: Easily discover and subscribe to feeds of entries by topic

-- Widget Manager: Rearrange page content by drag-and-drop, and integrate with third-party services

-- Transformer Plugins: Remix the entire Movable Type interface by using simple, free plugins

-- Activity Feeds: Manage your entire blog, its comments and TrackBacks, and get information on your blog's status with customizable feeds for administrators

-- Style Catcher: Choose from hundreds of flexible designs without editing any HTML

-- Feed Widget: Include content from any standard feed right on your blog

-- Feeds for search results: Site visitors can subscribe to a particular keyword

-- Enhanced Task Scheduling: System or plugin actions can be automated and performed at scheduled times, without complicated setup or configuration.

-- Enhanced Activity Log: Every action in the system is recorded for administrators, and results can easily be filtered or exported for reporting

-- Flexible URL Archiving: Ultimate control over your blog publishing, letting you choose the web address for all of your content to optimize for search engines.

-- Templated search results and email notifications: Customize search result pages or email messages to match your design or to include advertising.

-- Simpler Settings: Blog configuration now displays fifty fewer settings and controls without sacrificing any advanced options for power users.

-- Smarter Defaults: New simple entry screens make it easier to start creating content, and improvements like resizeable posting areas make authoring more productive.

The trademark world-class support that Six Apart and Movable Type are known for is included with a Movable Type 3.3 license.

"The adoption rate of blogging by large companies has really exploded recently," said DL Byron, Principal of Textura Design, the firm that has deployed blogs for of a number of Fortune 500 companies and author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for your Business. "With MT Enterprise, and especially with the support and experience they are able to offer customers, Six Apart is not only responding to but uniquely meeting the needs of these enterprise bloggers."

"Our commitment to innovation and support for Movable Type is stronger than ever," said Seki. "Since announcing our business blogging strategy in March, we have added to our engineering team, introduced enterprise-level support options, seen an enthusiastic response to the launch of our nationwide blogging seminar series, and today we are launching the Six Apart Developer Network, which will offer resources to Six Apart developers, partners, and customers. The Developer Network site can be found at http://developer.sixapart.com/. We're proud to continue to lead and help grow the business blogging market."