Last Friday I talked at length with Greg Reinacker, President of Newsgator. He was generous with his time and patient with someone both new to RSS and not overly technical. I am a Newsgator user and find it very helpful as a personal productivity tool. It is easy for a non-technical user like myself. All you do is click on the Newsgator button on your Windows tool bar when you are at a site you want to subscribe to. Newsgator then analyzes the feed and adds it to a newly created Outlook folder if it is RSS enabled.
What excites me even more is its potential use as an enterprise communication tool and its moves to provide more features that support this objective. In this mode it can become a significant component of enterprise portals. There is much on its web site that covers business uses, both inside and outside firewalls, as well as Newsgator’s on-line services, so I will just hit a few highlights here.
The Triple Point Technology case provides an example of multiple uses inside the firewall. Greg said that other clients have implemented some of these uses but Triple Point is a good example of many of them in use within the same organization. Triple Point developers use web logs to post FAQs, design documentation, daily test results, status reports and they use Newsgator to automatically feed relevant updates to specific Outlook folders, eliminating reliance on e-mail for this. Triple Point has also integrated Newsgator into business applications, such as release control programs, to enable dynamic feeds on source code changes and other key project information. They have done the same with Sharepoint to automate content change notifications.
Another high tech firm is using Newsgator to automate change notification in their patent life cycle process. “Patent number” has been added as a new column in Outlook, allowing users to sort notifications by patent. In addition, feeds specific to project teams provide notifications of status meetings that automatically update Outlook calendars.
With its on-line services, Newsgator has moved beyond reliance on Outlook usage for news aggregation to offer a web version on their site, the means to use other e-mail tools, and the ability to hit mobile devices. They also allow you to read updates on selected text and multimedia content on your TV through Windows XP Media Center. You can customize feeds by machine so you can designate separate content to your home and work computers.
The vision for the on-line services offering is to both extend its offerings to individuals, allowing for more access means and expanded services, and to provide an enterprise platform for user controlled communication through multiple devices. There are many opportunities to build off this platform for custom applications targeted to specific business needs. With these features, knowledge management gains greater user control.
Many people are saying that RSS is one of the next big ideas for both personal and business communication. It is nice see some practical proof of the possibilities through Newsgator. I am sure that this is just the beginning.
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