Enterprise RSS - 3 Major Vendors Show The Way
Forrester has just released a new report on Enterprise RSS. Specifically it tackles the issue of information overload in the corporate environment, now that RSS feeds are an important source of information in the workplace. Also it covers how IT departments are becoming more interested in enterprise RSS solutions, particularly from 3 vendors who seem to be doing very well out of this market: Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator.
Forrester sent a free copy of the report to Read/WriteWeb, so here is a quick review of its contents.
I think we all know about the issue of information overload - and the resulting value of good filters and smart aggregators. In some ways the problem is worse for enterprise employees - because as well as external news sources, they have potentially hundreds of internal RSS feeds to track via company blogs and wikis.
In the report, Forrester recommends that companies purchase "an enterprise RSS solution". Three vendors in particular are mentioned: Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator. Each of these vendors has an RSS solution that runs behind the firewall. The below diagram from Forrester nicely captures the value that such solutions provide:
Apart from things like filtering, collaboration and access control, enterprise RSS solutions typically integrate in some manner with existing corporate systems. A good example:
"KnowNow, for example, can effectively "RSS-ify" corporate data, taking important events, updates, or status changes that reside in disparate systems like ERP, CRM, and supply chain management (SCM) and syndicate them to appropriate stakeholders. Wells Fargo uses KnowNow to monitor customer data and warehouse schemas, routing inconsistencies and problems to appropriate business analysts in real-time."
Conclusion
In the world of web 2.0 blogs, not as much attention is paid to enterprise RSS solutions as consumer RSS solutions (Google Reader, Pageflakes, Feedburner and so forth). But if you're looking to introduce RSS into your company or organization, then you should certainly look closely at services like Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator. If anyone knows of alternative solutions, please note them in the comments.
There's also the issue of how RSS is being adopted in the enterprise - and the Forrester report suggests that it still hasn't reached much beyond PR, IT and marketing people. HR and R&D people are showing good signs of adopting it, but comments from the Forrester report such as "knowledge managers will need to RSS enable internal content" [for R&D people] show that there is still a lot of work to be done.
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There is an alternative solution called Desktop Alert, from a company called Skinkers (www.skinkers.cin) located in London. They offer an application that will read internal and external feeds and show to staff via a ticker or as an alert.
We have implemented within our enterprise Intranet, with little success due to our internal mind set where people are not used to change and to receive information this way.
I am not sure how RSS makes sense in the enterprise.
Existing E-Mail and Workflow solutions must be sufficient.
Given the capability to send emails to groups, why will you need a desktop alert?
For the consumer space (and enterprises as well), there's the FeedCentral web service from FocusFriends. It's a complete REST API driven RSS solution where any "consumer" (e.g. website, application, reader, etc) can perform personalized search requests on the feed archive and receive the output in various formats, including images. Take a look at some of the use cases below. It also provides "guided search" via content sensitive navigation. This allows you to explore large amounts of information very fast without the problem of overload. And the user experience is just a plain and simple web site that everyone is familiar with. A full personalized and guided search engine is next...
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Worklight seems to have an interesting enterprise RSS solution. I have been using their gadget on iGoogle. Their server product also incorporates an API for building 'adaptors' to existing legacy information.
This is an interesting post. I wonder if enterprise feeds increase or decrease productivity in the end.
I am not sure how RSS makes sense in the enterprise.
Existing E-Mail and Workflow solutions must be sufficient.
Given the capability to send emails to groups, why will you need a desktop alert?
Actually i don't hve clear idea abt RSS. can any body explain me?
If you have not had the problem of keeping up with massive amounts of information without having to poll or surf, you do not have a need for RSS. Otherwise, take a cue from bloggers and know that if you track multiple blogs and you have to surf each one of them, every time, you'll rapidly understand this aggregation concept. If you'll note how news organizations are now using this for content distribution as well as bait to entice traffic, you'll rapidly understand the potential in a marketing world.
Simply close your eyes and imagine you could personally keep track of 1000% (yes, one thousand percent) more web contained data in a single tool you don't have to open like an e-mail or surf, in the same amount of time you do this today, then you'll "get it".
PRESSfeed is a good solution for PR and marketing use to get content out to interested parties. It can also be used in the enterprise as well. It's easy to use and has social media elements like tagging and social bookmarking built right in