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Leading RSS vendor NewsGator is hitting some impressive marks in the consumer RSS world, and while the company’s enterprise RSS products are also gaining momentum, it’s a much slower rate of adoption, with a growing interest in “passive RSS” solutions.

If you're new to the term, RSS stands for -- depending on who you talk to -- Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It is an XML format for delivering and reading updated content from web sites and other sources. Many uses rely on RSS readers to obtain specific news -- say on sports, entertainment, or technology -- but RSS can also help you stay on top of developments in your company. (Intranetjournal.com is one of the news sites with an RSS feed to which readers can subscribe. Look in the left-hand column of this page.)

On the enterprise RSS side, “we’re starting to see more adoption at big companies,” said Todd Berkowitz, NewsGator director of marketing, although it’s still a tiny percentage of people.

More than 100 enterprises, media companies, and leading brands are now using NewsGator Enterprise Server and NewsGator Private Label Platform to improve the way their employees, customers and site visitors find and share information, NewsGator said.

But many big companies are still getting their heads around enterprise-class RSS.

“(Traditional RSS) still takes some degree of work on the users’ end,” Berkowitz said. “That poses more challenges.” Because of that, Berkowitz sees more of what he calls the use of “passive RSS” technology.

“That seems to be the direction people are going. They’re looking for an alternative,” he said.

Passive RSS comes in the form of NewsGator Desktop, which pops up --“pops up like a piece of toast,” Berkowitz said -- your most important RSS articles in your system tray. It also provides synchronization with Internet Explorer 7, allowing users to subscribe to feeds in IE7 and view them with NewsGator Online and other NewsGator applications.

The companies that are embracing RSS are doing it for a few different reasons, but one of the chief reasons is “everyone gets too much email,” Berkowitz said. And what about the portal sites within companies that are supposed to be used to distribute news and information? To allegedly cut through the clutter? “People just don’t go to those sites,” he said.

One analyst argues that companies and workers should be relying more on RSS.

G. Oliver Young of Forrester Research said that “information workers today are drowning in content -- email, newsletters, press releases, and spam -- and the problem is getting worse. To deal with this tsunami, workers are turning to RSS.”

It’s a trend that should accelerate, Young said. “To prevent problems like bandwidth overload and security infractions, information professionals should implement enterprise RSS solutions.”

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