Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals
RSS Goes Beyond Blogs, Into the Enterprise
Michael Pastore
5/18/2005
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RSS is synonymous with blogs, and blogs are often synonymous with the anti-establishment. But enterprises that pass on RSS may be neglecting a technology that drives costs down and goes far beyond the blogosphere.
RSS is a logical way to bring information inside of an organization and to distribute it once the information is inside, said Mike Terner, CEO of KnowNow, a privately held software company in Sunnyvale, Calif. The information can be a message, like a blog post, or data from an enterprise application.
"What blogs have done is taken this technology and made it popular," Terner said. The reason blogs and the media have adopted RSS is that once readers find a channel with a subject that interests them, they tune in like a television.
KnowNow, which was founded in 2000, focuses on asynchronous Web messaging. Its middleware products deliver real-time event information to applications like Excel, which uses a plug-in to update data in an Excel spreadsheet.
With the introduction this week of its KnowNow 3 Enterprise Syndication Solution (ESS), the company is hoping to bring the benefits of RSS into the enterprise. ESS includes components called Live Server, Live Adapter, Speed Reader, and (coming soon) Speed Writer. The Live Adapter makes it easy to take information from a database into a corporate system and make it an RSS feed.
Because ESS is server-driven, organizations can distribute information feeds to their employees without having client computers clogging the network to check for information on a regular basis. The server goes out and gets the feed. "It's the one place where you reach out," Terner said.
ESS grew out of a request by one of KnowNow's customers, European financial services giant ING. ING was having trouble with its corporate portal and getting good communications across the different divisions of the corporation.
ING wanted a solution that didn't slow down the corporate network, had no client code, and could be used by employees that didn't have Internet access. ING also wanted the ability to filter outside newsfeeds to get rid of duplication and irrelevant information.
One of the main driver's for ING's search for a communications solution was its Chairman's Message, which was sent out to all employees via e-mail. But unlike RSS, e-mail doesn't always reach everyone. Issues with spam and filters block delivery, and e-mail isn't immediate like RSS. It has to wait until someone checks it. By moving to RSS, Terner said ING saves two-thirds on the cost of each message.
"It's all about reaching customers and employees, and being able to turn channels off," Terner told Intranet Journal. The Chairman's Message at ING now gets delivered straight into the employee portal that resides on employee computers as soon as it gets delivered.
Financial organizations have always been important customers for KnowNow's products because they are news-oriented and need the latest information. But the company is seeing ESS used at a small private college that has grant money coming in for students. The applications for money and the actual award may differ, and the school built a tool that pulls information from internal and external sources into the Speed Reader. The results look like e-mail, but they work like a report.
Terner sees the future of RSS in the enterprise focusing on the often repetitive reports that are compiled, circulated, and delivered around organizations. By moving them to RSS, corporations can make them more current and more functional by including transactional flows and updates.
ESS is standards-based, browser-based, operates without client-side software, and will cost customers in the area of $50,000 for most deployments.
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