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If you want to leverage RSS for your company without the limitations of a third-party provider that sits outside your firewall, Electric Feeds offers a solution for you. In Spreading the Word with RSS, I walked you through an explanation of RSS and its potential benefits for your organization. If you've decided it's right for you and you want to bring an affordable solution that will work with your intranet's existing look and feel, read on.

Electric Feeds is a hosted RSS solution that is based on FeedForAll, a leading RSS feed creation tool. FeedForAll allows you to create, edit, manage, and publish RSS feeds. What Electric Feeds does is bring the power of FeedForAll inside the organization in a way that allows you to customize subscription services and delivery to non-tech savvy employees unfamiliar with RSS and feed readers. Let's face it, when it comes to disseminating company information, employees don't care what technology you use. They only care that they can get the information they want, when they want it, and in a familiar format.

Electric Feeds offers the following benefits:

• Customized look and feel to match your company's existing branding and intranet sites.
• Hosted solution within the firewall to minimize security issues.
• Flexibility of an in-house solution without the in-house programming. You are not tied to a feed provider vendor that locks in your subscribers and makes switching vendors problematic.
• Multitude of delivery channels: instant messaging, text, handheld, feed readers, browser, email.
• Affordable, customized pricing and inclusive technical support.
• Create one custom interface that applies to every delivery channel.

While there is a demo page on their Web site, I found it more helpful as a guide to the myriad of choices available, rather than a great template to follow for designing your own subscription page. Clearly, the power of the subscription and display options are there, but if it was my internal site, I'd create a much more simplified page that would be less frightening to the average user. From a usability standpoint, keep it simple, and make it easy for someone to subscribe. Of course if you develop feeds that are only available internally, you wouldn't be offering options such as Yahoo and Google and others like they show in the demo.

In determining your organization's needs, consider two parts of the puzzle to determine your level of pricing. First, who is creating the feeds? This is the number of people that need the software installed on their PCs. Second, how many feed channels will you be offering through your subscription page? A feed channel can be thought of as a category or a specialized content channel. For instance, you might have company news, product information, or employee activities.

A combination of both the number of people generating feeds and the number of feed channels will tie into Electric Feed's tiered pricing structure. The most basic installation of a single PC generating the feeds and up to five feed channels will run you approximately $459. If you require site-wide licensing to handle a large number of feed authors and feed channels, you'd be looking at a range of $3,500 and up. If you are not sure what your needs are, you can get more information on pricing and customized implementation at Electric Feed's Web site or by calling 1-800-894-3211.

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Other Resources

from Intranet Journal

Intranet Journal Discussion Board Spreading the Word with RSS RSS Goes Beyond Blogs, Into the Enterprise

from JupiterWeb

Set Up a Simple Syndication Feed Using RSS (DevX) Is RSS the Answer to the Spam Crisis? (Small Business Computing)

from the Web

Electric Feeds FeedForAll