Just a few weeks ago I called for the dismantle of CMS systems and to rebuild with social media features

If you’re looking at upgrading to the new Sharepoint for it’s social media features, or at Sharepoint itself you must check out Blogtronix.

Vassil the CEO and founder of Blogtronix stopped by Podtech (he’s been by a few times) to show me some of the latest stuff. I didn’t have as much time as I wanted, so it was really slam session in feature demonstrations. I learned a lot.

It appears to be a ‘community platform’ in a box, which features such as social networking elements, blogs, wikis, ratings, comments, RSS, document management tools, keywords, tagclouds, rss generated by keywords, and profile information. It appears to have hooks into directory systems such as Active Directory, and is all written in dot net. I look forward to seeing threaded forums added to the suite. Teresa from Blog Business Summit thinks the features are pretty cool too.

I’ve used Sharepoint, and have tried demos of the recently released blog and wiki features. Perhaps the primary difference between Sharepoint and Blogtronix is that Sharepoint was intended and grown to be a collaboration tool, and now social features are being added on top. Blogtronix is less of a collaboration tool, and more of a social media platform. In many business use cases, both could meet the same needs.
When deploying a public facing community marketing program that’s intended to reach to existing communities you may want to think about other tactics. For those that a thriving community that’s bursting at the seams to talk to each other, Blogtronix is a good fit. While you’re at it, also check out Community Server, which famed Microsoft community Channel 9 sits on top of.

If you work at Community Server or on the Sharepoint team, swing by I’d love to see your latest.