We are using the WordPress Blog tools for business purposes today. We run all our management team meetings using a Management Team Blog. Agendas are posted to a Page (input by senior management admin assistant), with new and old ones available at a click. Each agenda topic which has an attachment to review before the meeting is posted to an ongoing string of Posts. Management Team members review all such pre-reading before the meeting and post any suggestions as comments. The author then replies if necessary. The meetings are run online with no paper handouts. We have pages for suggested readings/web page links, etc. Each management team member has their own departmental blog, which is linked to the Management Team Blog. There are features we wish we had to make this better, but it has been a good thing for us to help be more efficient, collaborative, and paperless.

I disagree with Mr. Schneider's assertion that the main challenge inhibiting the adoption of blogs as an enterprise tool is technology. My experience has been that the greatest challenge is not technology, but rather culture and the perception that creating a blog entry is not value added. Most organizations will get past the technology issues if they truly believe that the technology creates value.

I believe that blogging can be a very effective communication and collaboration tool, but in order for an organization to really "get it" and adopt the technology they need to change the way they (1) assess value or value creation, and (2) define effective communication and collaboration. These same arguments can be made for adoption of other social technologies (e.g. wikis).

My experience has been that the adoption of social technologies as enterprise tools/applications is (or has been) most effective when started as a "grass-roots" movement within the organization (which coincidentally is not dissimilar to how they have evolved in the consumer space).

The value created through the use of social technologies is not intuitive to many and, as such, they are not likely to adopt them immediately. However if they see the tools being used by others and can, first hand, see the business benefits, more and more will start adopting the tools until they reach, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, a tipping-point.

why would anyone use wordpress when it has so many security holes... even a the script-kid malcor can hack it!!!!