Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals
Utilizing RSS in your Lotus Intranet
4/21/2008
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
The Notes 8 feed reader is built into the sidebar in the Notes client. It’s fairly rudimentary in comparison to some standalone alternatives, but it has the distinct advantage of being built in. It’s one more thing that Lotus has bundled into the Notes 8 client experience.
With the Notes 8 client you have one piece of software that you can live in all day long. You can read your mail, manage your calendar, browse the web, create documents, play with widgets, and read your RSS feeds. This is pretty significant as it makes it easier for your end users. They don’t have to open a different program for each task they want to complete throughout their day.
Also, you can set up the feeds your user subscribes to when you configure their Notes client for the first time. You can subscribe them to information from Domino databases like blogs based on the IBM Blogging template or the open source Blogsphere template. Quickr has blogs, wiki’s and document libraries that have feeds as do Connections blogs and Dogear bookmarks.
IBM Lotus even ships a backend database with Domino that you can use to convert views in normal Lotus applications into RSS feeds. You can now create a view in any Lotus application and create a feed for it in a few steps. The database is still a little rough around the edges, and could probably be the subject of its own article, so we won’t go into all the details here. Just know that it can be done, and you’ll need a little help from your application developers and server admin.
Subscribing to a Feed in Notes 8
The way to subscribe to a feed in Notes 8 is easy. The first thing you have to do is find the feed at whatever website you want to subscribe to. You’ll generally see an orange RSS or XML icon, or there will be a link to “Subscribe to our feed” somewhere on the page.
For this example, I’ll use the RSS feed from my blog. I use a common service called FeedBurner that hosts my feed for me, and the feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greyhawk68. To subscribe, you do the following:
Open the Feed Reader sidebar panel in Notes Click on the “Subscribe to Feed” icon. It’s the square orange icon with a plus sign over it A dialog box will pop up asking you to enter the the web address or feed URL you would like to subscribe to Enter the URL (in this case http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greyhawk68) and click GO Subscribe Window
The Add New Subscription Window
The configuration information for the feed pops up below, tweak anything you wish and then click OK The feed is then added into your list of feeds and you see the latest posts from that site
A list of posts in the Notes 8 Feed Reader
Clicking on a post will pop-up a window with the story in it You can read the post in the pop-up, or you can click the Open button to go to the webpage where the post originated
Reading a post in the Notes 8 Feed Reader
It really is that simple. Now, every time a feed is updated, it will show up in the Feed Reader, and your users can get the information they need.
Other uses for RSS
RSS doesn’t just have to be about your own company’s information. You can subscribe to feeds from pretty much all major news outlets and websites. For example, we have a feed here at Intranet Journal. You can subscribe to us by pointing your feed reader to http://www.intranetjournal/feed.xml. That will allow you to get updates any time we post an article.
RSS is also a great way to get podcast updates. Podcasts are recorded audio programs that can run anywhere from around ten minutes to an hour. You can use iTunes to subscribe to a podcast feed, and any time a new audio program is posted it will download to you. In fact, many alternate media sites have RSS feeds. You can subscribe to your friend’s or families photo streams from a site like flickr or recently uploaded videos to YouTube.
Bringing all the info to you
I use RSS every day to subscribe to nearly 300 different blogs and news sites. I would never be able to keep up with that much information if I had to visit every site individually. You’ll find that your end-users might feel the same way about your intranet. There’s a lot of information for them, but they don’t have time to go and get it all.
Well now they don’t have to. Set up some RSS feeds in your organization and you can have all the information come to them. It’s extremely useful to your end users, and once again, you can be the hero.
About this Series
This series of articles on intranet solutions with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and it's companion products is intended to help readers understand the fundamental methodology and capabilities of the product and how to utilize it to deliver a feature-rich, secure, and functional corporate intranet solution. It will include implementation strategies, case studies, industry-tested tips and tricks, and, with your input, true value to the administrator or developer who wants to utilize IBM Lotus technologies to deliver winning intranet solutions.
If you have any questions on the series, Lotus Notes/Domino, or if there's something you'd like to see addressed, visit the Intranet Journal Discussion Forum.
About the Author
John Roling is the Senior Groupware Administrator for a North American trade-show exhibit company and a certified Lotus Notes Administrator, Developer and all-around geek. You can keep up with him at his blog (www.greyhawk68.com) or drop him an e-mail at jroling@gmail.com.
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