Your company has just rolled out an amazing enterprise blogging system. Time to celebrate. Internal communication will be much easier. The pace of innovation will quicken. Soon, you and all your colleagues will retire young and wealthy. Well....sort-of.

In the short term, there is a bit of work to be done transitioning on to the new system. Supposed you are part of the team that set up the enterprise blogging system. You will need to train hundreds, or even thousands of people on how to use your new enterprise blogging system. To ease that process, you will make sure that your users have access to the best WYSIWYG editor. If you are using MovableType, you might end up using Movalog's Ajaxify plug-in to give your users an input screen that looks like this:

From a practical perspective this will inevitably mean a lot of cutting and pasting of content from MS Word into your new enterprise blogs.

Anil Dash wrote an excellent piece on Web Office cut & paste a few days ago just as Ray Ozzie was announcing Microsoft's brilliant Live Clipboard initiative. The Live Clipboard screencasts that Microsoft put together are really worth checking out.

There are a wide range of types of cut & paste, so perhaps it would be useful for me to clarify the differences as I see them and exactly which kind is needed here:

1. Cut & Paste of Content from Desk Top App into Web Office solution.
2. Cut & Paste of Structured Content from Web Office App to another Web Office App
3. Cut & Paste of Interactive Functionality from Web Office App to another Web Office App

Anil Dash and Ray Ozzie were talking about the second type of cut & paste. Ozzie's solution is to support the microformats initiative, and hope that people write applications to support the pasted microformatted XML information.

As I have said before, I believe that Microformats are the Nanotechnology of Web 2.0. My experience with FpML has taught me that breaking up an XML schemea into lots of little formats eventually makes things easier to work with. The FpML team has done this brilliantly.

AJAX badges are the third type of Cut & Paste. AJAX Badges are interactive widgets you can cut & paste into a blog post or a wiki article. The difference between a normal widget and an AJAX badge is the level of interactivity.

An AJAX badge is a full-blown, although mini, MVC application. It has a back-end DB. The point is that both the blog author and the blog visitors interact with the badge.

For example, an AJAX Badge might be a simple to-do list that you paste into a blog post. Go to that blog post and you can add to the list or mark some items as completed. Making this work in a Web Office world is hard because you need to set up an underlying access control. If I set up a project, I do not want everyone marking our to-do items as completed. I only want the project team to be able to do that.

Getting cut & paste types 2 and 3 working is a nice longer term goal. In the short term, the simple cut & paste from Word into a WYSIWYG blog authoring form is most important.

Right now, unformatted cut & paste works, but formatted cut & pasting starts to break down. This means bullets and lists do not always show up correctly.

For new enterprise blog and wiki users, being able to cut & paste from basic word docs into blog and wiki posts will be one of the most important barriers to entry that needs to be overcome.