Blogging pioneer Six Apart Ltd. has made an aggressive move to defend and expand its presence in the workplace now that major vendors like IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have begun to build blog components into their enterprise collaboration platforms.

On Tuesday, Six Apart released the most significant upgrade in years of its enterprise blogging software Movable Type, boosting what many industry experts already consider to be the most sophisticated product of its kind.

Movable Type 4 has been rearchitected to simplify companies' management and deployment of corporate blogs and the creation of online communities, Six Apart officials said.

The company also announced its intention to release an open source version of Movable Type in this year's third quarter for companies and developers interested in extending the functionality of the platform.

The new version's enhancements keep Movable Type ahead of the rudimentary blogging capabilities vendors like IBM and Microsoft have begun putting in their collaboration platforms.

"No one has anything as robust as Movable Type. Six Apart has a big head start," said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst.

However, Six Apart must keep enhancing the product and making sure it's easy to integrate with enterprise systems, because what Microsoft and IBM lack in sophistication they make up for in the convenience of providing broad, one-stop collaboration platforms.

"This is where the Movable Type story needs to be stronger," said Mike Gotta, a Burton Group analyst.

Increasingly, enterprise customers expect to have an integrated suite of Web 2.0 collaboration software that includes things like blog, wiki and content syndication applications, Gotta said.

A step in the right direction is Movable Type's inclusion in Intel Corp.'s SuiteTwo bundle of Web 2.0 enterprise collaboration software, although it remains to be seen if SuiteTwo will succeed in the market, Gotta said.

SuiteTwo, which also includes wiki software from Socialtext Inc., integration services from SpikeSource Inc. and content syndication tools from NewsGator Technologies Inc. and SimpleFeed Inc., became available in April.

Integration and bundling efforts aside, Six Apart should also consider building a wiki component for Movable Type, because there is so much synergy between wikis and blogs, Gotta said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.