Here is a comprehensive overview of our topic Fred Cavazza’s blog. I will not attempt to go beyond what Fred wrote and just provide the link in this post with a recommendation to look at it. The quote below will give you a taste of what he said. There is much more good stuff.

“Let’s face it: a file can be lost, does not always fit in messaging systems’ limit and are a real lost of money for internal mailing systems. They are outdated, from a time when Microsoft’s Office was considered as business enhancers. Today’s reality is different: we write in Powerpoint, make tables in Word and draw charts in Excel. It is time to make this change and that’s what blogs and wikis are up to.

Blogs, with their simplified publication engine allow contributors to start posting without reading manual or attending a training ; with their intuitive interface where beginners can “consume” information with more accuracy (by using categories, archives, tags) and efficiency (by using RSS feeds). In some large company (IBM, Microsoft, GE…) one can find thousands of blogs gathered in blog farms: horizontal ones (by job), vertical ones (by business units or countries) and transversal ones. Blogs are a very simple and effective way to extract information from proprietary systems (files, emails…) and to share them on large scale (CEO’s blog) or local scale (team’s blog).

Internal communication gets more simpler: no more lost emails, stacked replies where someone is always missing in CC, doubles and susceptibility management (”I am the project leader, why am I only in CC?“). Everything is handled by the blog engine: publication, comments, archives, categories… Blogs are also a perfect match for new comers in a team which can have access to discussions history. If you are looking for a golden rule, here it is: if more than 5 person are in CC of your mail, than you better write a post.”