RSS in the Enterprise

Before IE7 and Office 2007 Beta 2 I used Attensa to bring RSS Feeds into Outlook, I liked the product and I'm still on their mailing list, they just sent me a link to their white paper "Enterprise RSS: the center of attention" and it's useful reading for anyone asking what RSS means for internal information, and the management of information overload.

Their blog links to a report on RSS by Jupiter Research which says

• 63% of companies with over US $50M in revenue expect to use RSS by the end of 2006
• In May 2006 when the report was produced, only 29% of these companies were using RSS.
• 48% of companies who are doing RSS are spending $250K or more

With support in IE7 for RSS feed discovery and retrieval, Outlook 2007's ability to be a great reader for those feeds, and Sharepoint 2007's ability to make any list an RSS feed, implementing RSS solutions is going to be both cheap and easy for a lot of customers. I predict now that as RSS becomes more widely available users will begin making demands for RSS couched in terms like:

• Don't fill my inbox with a hundred bits of new information
• Don't save up 100 bits of news and send me a huge news letter
• Don't expect me to visit your web site to see if there is new information.
• Don't Mail me lists of links to your web site either
• Do allow me to carry your information on my laptop when I'm disconnected

All solved by RSS.

Tagged as RSS