Time for action — Microsoft employee blogs

In this last exercise, you saw how Microsoft is making use of blogs so that its employees can communicate the latest news about Microsoft's posture on open source to the world. Port 25 is a weblog dedicated to the open source community at Microsoft. Here you'll find discussions and posts on open source projects that Microsoft is collaborating with, or intends to collaborate with. However, Port 25 is just one little piece of the vast universe of employee blogs floating around. Some blogs are hosted on Microsoft websites, and others are hosted on employees' personal sites. All in all, you'll find a lot of interesting things about Microsoft and also about its employees' hobbies, personal experiences, and thoughts in general. This is a trend that's expanding through a lot of big companies nowadays.

As we saw in previous exercises, blogs are a very powerful way to communicate with other people. That's the reason why big companies such as Microsoft let their employees use blogs to communicate within the company's premises (internal blogs) or with the rest of the world (external or personal blogs). For the open source community, blogs are the best tool to share their experiences and expertise on using open source software such as Linux, Apache Roller, WordPress, the Apache Web server, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, and Java Web applications, and much more. For example, if you are working on an open source application, you can invite other fellow programmers and web designers through your blog to collaborate with you. With Apache Roller, you can create a multiuser weblog where several users can post messages (including yourself), and keep up-to-date on every aspect of the software you are developing. Then, you can release downloads so that other people can test your software and post comments on your blog about it. And all of this without even having to move away from your PC!