SixApart released today version 1.5 of their enterprise-scale blogging software MovableType. Today’s release is largely in response to customer requests since the 1.0 release of MT Enterprise in July. New features include full LDAP integration for granular management of users and groups and support for SQL Server.
MovableType Enterprise supports multiblog aggregation, allowing a large number of blogs across an enterprise to be viewed centrally and makes new blogs easy to clone in large numbers with windows and UNIX installers. We covered the company’s move into enterprise scale blogging in March.
MT has been offering blogging software for 5 years and only recently rolled out an enterprise addition. How viable are WordPress and Automattic as enterprise competition? Chris Alden, now at MovableType, says they never see WordPress in the enterprise. The company says that among Fortune 500 companies with blogs, 75%-80% use some SixApart product – either MovableType or TypePad. That’s an impresive number and though they say the launch of MT Enterprise 1.0 was particularly succesful, they didn’t have any numbers they would give me on that.
Hopefully we’ll soon see some interesting integration of the newly acquired Rojo RSS reader. For now though, today’s release appears to be based primarily on making MovableType Enterprise truly suitable for enterprise use than it is on adding anything too glamorous. Richard McManus, a happy MoveableType user, has more.