How should I think of using a Blog in my business?

How should I think of using a Blog in my business?
The uses for a blog in business are as many as the uses for email or instant messaging. No two companies will use Blogs for the exact same purpose. However, regardless of the business case that is developed to enable blogging, companies should create guidelines and administrative policies to help manage a blog that is appropriate for the selected audience. At a base level, blogs should create and post guidelines for appropriate subject matter, language and respect for other readers. Site authors should take responsibility for actively managing their blog’s content, removing any material which does not follow the guidelines. Companies should also speak with their legal advisors to ensure that the proper disclaimers are listed – especially if the blog is available to external Internet users and is accessible through a corporate website. The expectation should be that if an author takes the time to create a blog, then it is the author’s responsibility to ensure comments on their blog are in compliance with company guidelines. As such, it is often recommended that authors have control over who can publish comments as well as which specific users can create comments to begin with.
To read more about how blogs can be used in a business environment, refer to the article “Using Blogs and Wikis in Business” at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/techref/blogs.mspx. Additionally, the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team has their own blog built at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint.
How does Windows SharePoint Services help me organize posts and comments?
A Blog site hosted on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 enables a number of features to help the blog author manage content as well as for blog users to locate relevant information. To begin, blog categories can be defined by the author, which enables new posts to be placed with other related posts. For example, in our Sales Support Blog above, there are two posts. One is categorized under the “Modern Product Line” and the other under the “Classic Product Line”. When the blog site was created, the author clicked on the link “Add a new category” and created these two, which describes the company’s product lines currently available to the marketplace. If a user wants to see all posts and comments related to the “Classic Product Line” category, they simply click on the “Classic Product Line” category to automatically filter out unrelated entries. To create a blog category, the user must have full control or design permissions.
How do I create a Blog post?
Blog posts can be created in many methods: While web and Microsoft Office Word 2007 are the most common methods, some companies allow their users to create blog posts via email, through Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 or through a compatible mobile phone. Perhaps the easiest is to create a blog entry directly from the Windows SharePoint Services Blog site. This method, which requires the user to be online during the writing of the post, is simple and provides the user with the capability to create the Blog post title and utilize rich publishing features such as font editors, color text, tables and other formatting capabilities. It also allows users to insert pictures into their blog post, which can be useful when creating team discussions regarding physical design images or other tangible products. To create a post using the web editor, click on the link “Create a Post” from the main site which opens a page where users enter the post Title, body content, category and published date. After the blog is created, a user can click “Publish”, which will put the post into the queue for approval or, if the user is an approver, automatically post the blog entry to the site. Alternatively, the author can save the post as a draft, enabling them to come back and finish the blog post at a later date.
The second method that can be used to post a blog entry is by using Office Word 2007 as a blog posting tool. By clicking on the link “Launch blog program to post”, users open Office Word 2007 to author a new post. Pictures, tables, images and formatting can all be used as if the user was creating an Office Word 2007 document. When the post has been completed, the user clicks ‘Publish’, which places the post into the queue for approval, or immediately publishes if the author is an authorized approver. Alternatively, a user can click on the pull-down arrow under the Publish button to select “Save as Draft”. When a user is offline, they can save their post as a work in progress, opening it back up and publishing it at a later time.
Users who wish to create a post from within Office Word 2007 can do so by selecting “New Blog Post” from the list of available template that appears when creating a new document. Some ‘power bloggers’ make posts to multiple blog sites, all of which are managed using Office Word 2007. To determine which blog site the post is meant to be posted to, the user selects the correct blog from a pull down list within the Office Word 2007 document, just under the title bar, after the word Account.
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