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In the past few years as Lotus has embraced Web 2.0 technologies, they’ve started to embed RSS support in nearly all of their groupware products. Domino, Quickr and Connections all allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds to get up-to-date information. Used correctly, RSS can really transform how people utilize all facets of your intranet.

What is RSS?

Wikipedia defines RSS as “a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts.” RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is an XML based format that users can subscribe to via feed reader software.

The feed reader software polls the XML on the website every so often (for example every hour) looking for changes to the file. If the XML file has changed, then it pulls down those changes to the software for the user to read.

The updates that come down are parsed out by the date of the change and the updated material. One of the most common uses for RSS comes in keeping up with blog entries. If you leave a feed reader open all day, every time a blog you’ve subscribed to is updated, you’ll be notified and the content downloaded.

Sites that utilize RSS can do so in one of two ways, either by providing the full text of the post, or via a small summary paragraph. If you set it up your RSS to only display a summary, then users have to click a link to access your website to read the rest of the information. If you include the full-text of the post, users can read the full article in their feed reader software.

When to use summary vs Full posts

Each type of feed has its advantages. The summary type outlined above is perfect for an intranet homepage or portal. The reason is, you generally have a lot of content other than the main stories on the homepage. Only having a summary feed allows an end user to get the gist of the post, but they have to click through a link to see the remainder of the story on the web page itself. This allows the user to get the content and still see everything else your intranet homepage has to offer.

Full text updates are better if the feed is simply giving information of a specific type. For example, if your Sales team has a blog where they update sales wins, but not much else, there’s no reason to have to go to the page to read the information. The info can come to you in your feed reader, and you never have to leave that software in order to get the whole story. In fact you don’t even have to have a particular webpage for the sales team, you could just have an RSS feed that your sales team is required to subscribe to.

Which Feed Reader to use?

There are tons of feed reader software packages out there, and you can find everything from standalone software packages to web-based readers. But, since this column is based on Lotus products, I’m going to focus on the Feed Reader built into the Lotus Notes 8 client.

The Notes 8 Feed Reader

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