One pack is aimed at enterprises wanting to do enterprisey things like use Oracle databases and LDAP directories, the other at enterprises wanting to engage customers in the kind of community site more typically found in today’s most popular blog web sites.
The releases are the latest stages of Movable Type’s evolution from corporate blogging package to what Chris Alden, executive VP and general manager of professional software at Six Apart, describes as a lightweight content management system.
Many web sites have become more like blogs, more community oriented, more dynamic, and blogging software has evolved to handle more traditional web content management features, he said.
Reflecting the focus on enterprises with the two new packs, the company has chosen to call them solutions, which doesn’t mean much outside of the enterprise software space, rather than feature packs or plug-ins, which would have been more familiar to most bloggers.
That said, We’re not trying to go after the high-end content management solutions, but we know a whole lot of use cases that don’t require that level of software said Alden.
The Enterprise Solution feature pack lets companies use enterprise databases such as those from Oracle and Microsoft, rather than only the MySQL and Postgres databases supported by regular MT4. It can also tie into LDAP user directories, so read access to blogs can be limited by user group.
The Community Solution feature pack is designed to bring more user interactivity to blogs, such as user profile pages, user blogs and Digg-like voting systems, according to Alden. It could be used to create a user feedback site a bit like Dell’s IdeaStorm, he said.
The features were mainly added after consultation with MT3 users, and from seeing how popular blogs such as the Huffington Post had expanded the existing software with custom plugins.
Instead of coming up with lots of smaller releases over the last nine months, we’re putting it in all in what we think is a transformative release, Alden said.
The software now has a component-based architecture that will allow Six Apart to release more feature packs aimed at specific vertical use cases, he said. Publishers, universities, financial services and human resources are all on the radar, he said.
The base MT4 software, which was released a couple of weeks ago, goes for $50 per user. The feature packs will be in the $20,000 ballpark, Alden said.
The company also announced two weeks ago that it will lead the creation of an open source version of Movable Type, to be known as MTOS. Six Apart intends to continue to make money from selling commercial licenses, rather than merely supporting MTOS, however.
