A Busy Week for Six Apart
Last week was a busy one in the Six Apart world. Of course I was attending ETech that I'm just catching up on the action. Here is a recap.
BusinessWeek published an article feature co-founder Mena Trott on the Future of the Blog. It's in question and answer format and further underscores the company's focus on bringing blogging to the masses and the challenges involved. Oddly the conversation centers around the consumer market rather then the business one.
The company announced an Enterprise edition of Movable Type. It's available in Japan where business blogging is said to be brisk. Six Apart is also beta testing it with some corporate customers stateside. Coverage can be found here in Publish and here in TechCrunch.
We're very excited by this announcement as it will make blogging behind the firewall easier and more viable through its added feature set. While a version has not been affixed to the Enterprise edition, this is essentially a version 1.0 release. In our review of the Enterprise edition, it's a good start but is missing some features some enterprises will find important such as MS SQL Server support.
The company also announced the availability of TypePad Business Class services for hosting and supporting company weblogs for communicating with their customers.
Related to these business-oriented announcements, the company also unveiled Blogging Solutions for Business. This section of the company's website will be an ongoing effort to provide customers with experiences, recommendations, and expertise to using blogs as a simple, powerful tool that can help improve communications.
Last the company acquired SpalashBlog a hosted photoblogging service. The Blog Herald describes the service as making the process of mobile photo blogging easy, allowing mobile bloggers to capture an image and publish it to a photoblog in as little as two clicks.
