Finally people are getting the power of RSS
by Tris Hussey at 04:47PM (PDT) on
May 19, 2005

I found this on the Intranet
Journal website–RSS Goes Beyond Blogs, Into the Enterprise.
Here's the gist, large companies are finally realizing that RSS isn't
blogs and blogs aren't RSS. RSS is an information delivery technology.
It allows for data to be structured and streamed in an extremely
efficient manner to large numbers of delivery mechanisms. I'm going to
write about Newsgator and FeedDemon later, but they are intimately
connected to this whole shift. When I was with pharma we were testing
and deploying portals. Idea being, give employees a central,
personalized location for information delivery. The problem with a
portal is that most information doesn't change that much day to day. If
the company picnic is June 17th, that isn't going to change. HR's
policy on tank tops and sandals isn't going to change either. The end
result, because the portal appears stagnant, people stop visiting. Sure
you can force people to use web-based systems for expense reporting,
etc. Fine, but day-to-day information needs will be fulfilled
elsewhere. This is the beauty of RSS, it's more passive. For example
all employees, by default, are subscribed to key feeds from HR,
Corporate info, IT, etc. Then employees choose what interests them. So
if they want a daily update on the cafeteria menu, cool. If not, fine.
Regardless of the choice the employee, the employee just has to have
the RSS app running and the data comes to them. Don't get me too wrong,
I think simple corporate portals are a good thing, but companies that
marry their whole information dissemination strategy on them will be
sorely disappointed. Likewise relying solely on e-mail. I don't know
how many hundreds of corporate e-mails I just wholesale deleted with
only the barest glance at the subject. Not good. And yes, I did miss
important e-mails from upstairs because once you get your 20th moronic,
useless corporate e-mail in a day, deleting the 21st feels justified.
So I hope that Enterprise RSS catches on. Certainly over-stuffed
corporate e-mail boxes will rejoice.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Weblogs and Business, RSS Aggregation, Learning 2.0 Services. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.