36887 Resource 214 24 21 1086829018491 1195923209238 Controlled Blogging Inward

Chad Dickerson's 'Blogging To Ourselves' article articulates a use case for blogs that has been in use for more than a year at MyST Technology Partners.

Chad Dickerson’s article ‘Blogging to Ourselves’ inspired me to open the subject a bit further. In early 2003 Andy and I started using the MyST platform (specifically MySmartChannels) to manage our business and operational information. MySmartChannels is capable of providing Weblog-like features, but also other capabilities like sorting, embedded link lists, and other transformations that business information requires. Weblog tools in general provide a useful backplane to create good notes about any subject matter. However, most Webog products are designed as products, not application platforms. If there’s one thing about IT that’s predictable, it is constantly shifting requirements. MySmartChannels was created as an application based on the MyST platform, but is itself, an application framework for building more refined business systems. This affords our customers great agility when requirements shift – as they will.We use MySmartChannels ‘blogs’ [for example] as a billing system, but before that, it was just a note-taking channel about our consulting work. We realized that the leap to creating a conduit of information suitable for our accounting person was very small. However, it required a security and permissions model which MyST natively supports. As we make notes about each project, we also include time and detailed descriptions. We also include links to completed pages and applications. The accounting process is met through an RSS subscription of each billing channel (one per customer). This has served as a unifying model of awareness which has now extended to our VAR’s; even they may subscribe to the billing channels. This makes it possible for the VAR’s to see (in real time) what we’re working on, and what their charges are.One thing that becomes clear after doing this for more than a year – you need a comprehensive search model, which we have, but I’ll save that for a future post. So at MyST Technology Partners, we blog inward and it really pays off. Other inward MyST Partners blogs include:<ul><li>Project Notes </li><li>Architectural Designs </li><li>Help for MySmartChannels FAQ’s </li><li>Company News </li><li>Software License Keys </li><li>Banking Information (we really trust our security model) </li><li>Corporate and Personal References </li><li>VAR News Channels </li><li>VIP News </li><li>NDA Communications </li><li>System Update Notifications</li></ul>Blogging inward is simple, effective, and very inexpensive. If you'd like to use our platform for your own inward Weblog experiments, <a href="mailto:info@myst-technology.com">give us a shout</a>. 10 application/xml false blogging inward knowledge continuity Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 190014 false false true false false false true 214 blog blogsite/MySTHome/web