Blogging on the Intranet

First of all, if you haven't seen it, hurry on over to the Virtual Writer's Group to look over my series about blogging using Blogger.

We've started an internal WordPress.org blog at work. In it, my department can get its message out to a diverse audience across my firm's entire US population without requiring them to go looking.

A blog's a great way to help your internal users engage with your group. Ideally, if your workplace is RSS-enabled, you don't have to e-mail your users about what's going on. They can subscribe to your blog and all the updates show up in their feed reader (more on that in some future posts). Internet Explorer 7 includes an embedded feed reader.

Even if you aren't RSS-enabled Word Press has a plug-in called Subscribe2 that allows your users to receive e-mail messages when you update the blog.

Why blog? In many companies, it's hard to get the core information on the Intranet updated. In our case, our Portal team has done an outstanding job creating our Intranet. It's easy to use and well-organized, but to get something changed requires an expenditure of time and resources, and in our current economic state, both are scarce.

Our blog allows us to own the means to update our users on important issues without requiring us to schedule updates weeks ahead of time. It puts our users a giant step closer to us and the information we can provide them, while still allowing enough of a barrier to assure we can do our jobs, as well as helping our users.

More on WordPress and its usage for internal blogging in the next post.