I’ve been trying to find an internal blogging solution for my team and have been coming up empty. Can there really be no good internal blogging product?

For our intranet, we use Atlassian Confluence - it’s a bit clunky, but it’s more or less worked as a semi-wiki. But its blogging tool doesn’t cut the mustard in a few key ways: most importantly because there’s no aggregator, so if you want to encourage everyone to post reflectively, you’ve got to click from profile to profile to profile if you want to read their posts. Yuck.

At the same time, I don’t really want to self-host my own thing or create a whole new set of credentials. I want a managed solution that allows people to log in using their existing SSO credentials (so accounts can easily be provisioned and deprovisioned), be presented with a feed of the latest posts, perhaps in a way that can be filtered by team, and then have the ability to easily post their own content.

The irony is that this sounds a lot like Known (or even the original version of Elgg), if it was set up in sandbox mode. Maybe there’s still room for a product of that form factor: a way to easily post reflective updates inside of a company, with a chronological social feed and live replies below each post, and aggregated insights for administrators about how the tool is being used.

I’d rather buy something off the shelf and give it to my team than build it. But I’m having real trouble figuring out what that is. So maybe I do need to build it. Again.