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Petter — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 05:56:25 -0400

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Six Apart takes Movable Type blogging virtual

IDG News Service — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:06:14 -0400

Blog pioneer Six Apart Ltd. (DEMOfall 05 and DEMO 04) Wednesday announced a "virtual" version of its popular Movable Type blogging software powered by a JumpBox virtual appliance to simplify developing and producing blogs by eliminating what can be elaborate set-up and configuring procedures of installing Movable Type on a Web server.

"For Web applications the challenge of setting up the software has become such an IT task that people lose sight of their goals for the blog," said Ed Anuff, executive vice president and general manager of the Movable Type division of Six Apart, in an interview. "By offering a virtual appliance we're reinforcing the competitive edge of our software and not letting installation issues stop people. We want to get people past the 'how to' discussion and get them to focus on the end-user capabilities and features for authors that Movable Type offers like Action Streams for connecting to social networks."

Virtual Movable Type is an "appliance" or pre-packaged and preconfigured software that includes everything needed to operate it as a blog or content management system, including databases, Web server software and operating systems, bundled as a virtual image that is ready to run on Linux, Macintosh, or Windows computers and servers.

Six Apart of San Francisco, CA is trying to nudge hosting companies to accept virtual appliances. While "virtual" or "cloud" computing has gained ground during the past 18 months, few Web hosting companies -like Amazon - are ready to accept blogs as virtual appliances today, Anuff said. He expects the Six Apart-JumpBox virtual appliance approach will initially be used mostly in the development and testing of blogs.

"In about four to six months, I believe we'll start to see a sea change because accepting virtual appliances will cost hosting companies less for support," Anuff said. "There's no business reason for hosting companies not to accept virtual appliances - it's early yet. In about a year, it will be the preferred method."

Movable Type is used by thousands of professional bloggers and media companies to manage blog content . Depending on internal servers and operating systems bloggers use, making a blog visible on the public Internet can be challenging without the help of IT professionals.

Virtual Movable Type users can select a hosting provider that uses VMware or Parallels virtual environments, or use their own virtualized servers running Parallels, Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server, or Microsoft Virtual PC. Virtual Movable Type by JumpBox can be downloaded from Six Apart's Web site. Virtual Movable Type and Virtual Movable Type Pro are free for developers and bloggers. Virtual Movable Type Pro for businesses is US$449.95 for five users and $1549.95 for 20 users.

"Virtual Movable Type by JumpBox is a great example of the ease of use JumpBox brings to server software deployment," commented Kimbro Staken, CEO of JumpBox Inc. "It takes minimal technical skill and just minutes to deploy, regardless of whether it's on your laptop, in the data center or in the cloud. This strips away the barriers to using server based applications like Movable Type and allows a less technical customer to take advantage of this great software."

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Six Apart takes Movable Type blogging virtual