The Aquarium group blog has been running for about 2 months now and I believe it was one of the first group blogs using Roller. Tim Bray's post on group blogging prompted me to write about some of my experiences with Roller and of group blogs in general; in the hope that others might find it useful. I certainly know from within Sun there seems to be a fair amount of interest in group blogs.

First, let me describe what The Aquarium is about. It's a blog about server-side Java, relaying news about Java EE 5, Web Services, XML, and GlassFish (the Open Source java.net project which includes Java EE 5 and Sun's Java Web Services Stack). We use the blog to highlight some of the cool things that people are doing in the GlassFish community; as well as injecting a bit of our own opinion from time to time. The Aquarium is a "professional blog" - by that I mean it has an important role to play in the community and awareness building for GlassFish - and a fair amount of time and effort has been invested to get it started.

I must admit I shared some of Tim's perception of what blogs are, ie. "... being about an individual voice..." and needed a little bit of pushing from my blog co-editors. I think some of my reluctance was that I knew I'd probably need to give up my personal blog on b.s.c (which I'd been nurturing for about 18 months) due to the pressures of balancing the job Sun actually pays me to do, my family and all the other interests competing for my time. Also, I actually like reading blogs that expose a bit of the bloggers personality from time to time and would argue that it adds some depth and colour. I also like being able to use my personal blog to rant about things that bother me; though I also appreciate that others read technology blogs for the technology alone and find the personal aspect a distraction. I guess we'll find the right balance over time.

One of the obvious benefits of a group blog is that we have the ability to share the load. As I mentioned previously - The Aquarium has a real job to do and that would be a very heavy load for a single person. For the domain we cover on the Aquarium there is never a shortage of news - so volume is pretty high (often four or five postings a day) though I think Carla and myself are running up a bit of a deficit !

Roller WebLogger is an Open Source, Java blog server used by Sun, IBM and JavaLobby; among others. Roller 2.0 introduced some features specifically for supporting group blogs, these include :

1. The ability to invite users to join a blog
2. Three levels of permission - Limited (draft but not publish entries), Author (Limited + post and edit entries), Admin (Author + change settings)
3. The ability to leave a group blog

There are other features that could be useful - using drafts and timed postings it is possible to create a 'pipeline' - ie. blog entries moving through the workflow - allocated to an editor, various drafts, reviewed, published. Unfortunately for us that isn't completely possible because we all use external blog editors and as far as I can tell most editors don't allow you to edit 'published / draft' posts. That said - the timed posting is pretty useful for spreading the posts through the day or timing to catch specific time-zones.

Also for the 'workflow feature' to be really useful it would also need edit locks to avoid overlapping writes on entries - this isn't something we've really had a problem with (there are only three of us) but would probably be a requirement for a larger group bog intent on using the pipeline more.

The only enhancement requests I have for Roller aren't really specific to group blogs as much as they are a requirement for high volume, busy blogs like The Aquarium. First would be the inclusion of tags - I see a 'category' as limited form of tagging - what you really need is the ability to apply zero or more arbitrary (ie. not previously defined) tags to a posting and be able to quickly search on the available tags.

We use a couple of wikis - one on java.net; and one internal (for all the secret stuff) to maintain a pipeline of future entries so we can keep track of who's doing what and when. We have a fairly loose process :

1. identify something bloggable
2. blog it or put it in the pipeline for someone else
3. get it reviewed (if needed)
4. post it or queue it

Additional note - mail, IM, blogs, wikis, workflow - I think these are essential tools for Enterprise Collaboration - these are the things that will probably combine to become the next generation 'Enterprise Intranet Portal'.