Dark Blogs Case Study - Euro Pharma Group by Ron Lichty

Suw Charman's Dark Blogs Case Study - A European Pharmaceutical Group was presented, discussed and distributed by Corante Research at the SuperNova conference in SF a few weeks ago. Tracy Cohen brought back a copy to Avenue A | Razorfish, and I just finished reading it.

"Dark Blog" refers to a blog behind the firewall -- one intended for internal audiences. The case study recounts how the pharma corp being studied installed four blogs for their Competitive Analysis group as a substitute for a KM (knowledge management) or CMS (content management system). It turned out to be less expensive, easier to use and more effective than the KM and CMS systems they'd tried.

The blogging product they picked was TeamPage from Traction Software, which had several leading edge features including:

• ability to comment on individual paragraphs within a blog post
  
• strong collaborative authoring capability that's almost wiki-like
  
• integration with LDAP so that users could be given different sets of permissions for viewing and editing various content elements.
  

Very innovative, what this pharma group did. The case study is well worth a read!