Feed your enterprise with RSS

NOVEMBER 2006

Written by Patrick Kennedy, published November 6th, 2006

Categorised under: articles, information management, intranets

Conceptually, ‘news feeds’ are quite simple, allowing content such as news articles to be delivered over the internet without the need to browse a website.

News feeds first came to our attention during the mid 90s when the hype surrounding ‘push’ was at its peak. The hype didn’t last and it was some time before feeds were again the centre of attention as ‘blogs’ entered the mainstream, almost a decade later.

Nowadays everyone has a blog and many websites offer a variety of feeds, from news, blog posts and even blog post comments. The technology underpinning these feeds is predominantly RSS, which originally stood for ‘Really Simple Syndication’.

For the purposes of this discussion, the terms RSS and ‘news feeds’ cover the actual RSS protocol (in all it’s various versions) as well as Atom (a later refinement of the RSS protocol), RDF and any other type of asynchronous information feed.

Lately, the concept has evolved to include multimedia, with ‘podcasting’ making use of feeds to deliver audio (music and radio programmes) and, more recently, video (ie ‘vodcasting’).

Hence it’s quite common for most web users to be using feeds on the public web. But what about within an organisation, are feeds useful there too?

RSS in the enterprise

A company can create its own feeds for internal use. The obvious use for these feeds is for distributing corporate news, particularly useful for multinational corporations where geography makes the coordinated updating of intranet news difficult.

However, there are a number of other hugely beneficial uses for feeds in the enterprise:

compiling multiple content sources
keeping up with industry developments
easily publishing corporate news
collaborating within project teams
synchronising and replicating content

This article will discuss each of these uses, before discussing how to get into RSS.

A good news reader will allow staff to easily devour a huge amount of information

Compiling multiple sources

The biggest benefit of using feeds over other methods of delivering content is not the delivery mechanism itself, but rather the ability to aggregate many different feeds from various sources into one stream of content.

This is done using an ‘aggregator’: a software tool-also known as a ‘news reader’-that brings all the feeds together into one list. A good news reader (and there is an increasing number to choose from) will allow staff to devour a huge amount of information with much less effort than reading email or browsing websites.

It is not uncommon for savvy web users to be subscribed to literally hundreds of feeds, and make good use of them all through use of an aggregator that allows them to efficiently scan, then read or ignore, the latest items from across their many feeds.

These applications are crucial to the success of RSS in the enterprise and should become part of the standard operating environment for all staff.

See “Choosing a news reader” on page 3 for more information on aggregator software.

Keeping up-to-date

One of the best uses for feeds is to allow staff to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in their area of expertise. For example, for the intranet team this might be content management, information architecture and web design.

The advantage of feeds in this regard is the ability to peruse the scraps of knowledge ‘blogged’ by a community of thought leaders, much earlier than the eventual article, book or masterclass. Knowledge becomes that much more accessible.

RIP email newsletters

The current practice hit the hardest by the introduction of news feeds is the dear old email newsletter.

Feeds remove the need for a publishing schedule. Rather than planning, writing and editing content for a weekly (or fortnightly etc) email newsletter, corporate communications staff can produce and publish content as and when it is necessary (or when they have time). The content will simply arrive in a users’ news reader the next time they open or refresh it.

This asynchronous delivery mode has an additional benefit, network traffic will be more spread out, reducing the load on email infrastructure (ensuring it is available for handling mission critical email traffic, which ‘news’ is typically not).

Ease of use

Email lists can be used in this way, but being subscribed to multiple email lists is very fiddly and time consuming. Most email applications do not offer the same degree of aggregation or organisation, without significant customisation by the user.

Email can do this, but juggling mailing lists is too fiddly

Considering many people delete a large number of emails without reading them and/or have a huge number of emails sitting in their inbox (to the frustration of IT departments everywhere), the number of staff who do organise their email to this extent is very small indeed.

Using a news aggregator would eliminate the need for setting up email in this manner and would be much simpler for staff to use.

Choosing to unsubscribe is also a far simpler proposition than with most mailing lists. The ‘corporate’ feeds should be optional, with staff making the decision to stay subscribed to the feeds that are loaded into their reader by default.

Research into intranet usage suggests that staff prefer ‘push’ to ‘pull’. Rather than having to go to a site and view information, most staff say they would like the information to come to them, in the form of an email or feed. With the prevalence of blogs in the modern web, users are comfortable with the concept. They are also relatively easy to setup, requiring little up-front investment.

Once introduced, most staff will welcome the technology and the relative emptiness of their inbox!

Other feeds should be allowed (within reason) such that staff can add external feeds which cover topics they have an interest in. By allowing staff to explore the technology they will grow more enthusiastic and reading their feeds will become as regular as checking their email in the morning.

Collaboration tool

Blogs and their corresponding feeds have been used to great effect, within enterprise, as a means of facilitating horizontal communication. This includes communication within project teams and ‘communities of practice’, which typically have more specialised requirements than general staff.

Tools such as wikis and discussion forums are suitable mechanisms for actual collaboration, but blogs are an easy method of summarising progress and building awareness. Staff in other parts of the business can add the feed to their reader and stay up-to-date with what’s happening overall, or follow a more specific discussion.

Data synchronisation

In addition to delivering news or other content for human consumption, feeds can also be used for more complex tasks, such as content synchronisation and a host of other technical things which IT departments get all excited about.

Many organisations, particularly those which face the challenges of geographical separation, are opting for feeds to transfer content updates between systems, for syndicating content around the world, or as a means of programmatic messaging (in preference to more complex technologies such as SOAP or web services).

Adopting RSS

The sensible first step would be to run a limited trial. Choose a source of content with a reasonably steady flow, such as corporate news, and turn this into a feed for use by a select number of staff. Roll-out a chosen news reader (see below for some suggestions) to these people and invite their feedback. If this is successful, try channeling a number of other content streams (such as team blogs) into their news readers.

Take the same approach as for the intranet; understand the needs of the audience

Welcome staff suggestions for other feeds they might find useful and examine these for their feasibility and ability to meet business objectives. The same approach should be taken to producing feeds as is taken to creating websites or intranets; understand the needs of the audience and then create a solution which meets those needs.

Once content publishers and participants are happy with the results of the trial, the news reader application should be added to the standard operating environment and rolled-out to all staff. As with any intranet development, this roll-out should be promoted so that staff know what is happening and why. Eventually, email newsletters and the news section of the intranet can be discontinued, with their content now flowing freely through feeds alone.

Whilst RSS is most often the product of a blog, there is no need for a blog to exist in order to use feeds. Publishers can either create feeds directly or simply use a blog to create the feeds but not make the blog visible to staff. This might be a most agreeable solution if the company intranet is already too crowded and bolting on a blog would only make matters worse.

A central list of feeds for staff should be created and placed on the intranet, and this should be loaded into the chosen news reader when first installed, whether during roll-out to all staff or for new starters.

Choosing a news reader

The best method of selecting any piece of software is to identify the required functionality for the staff who will be using it. Some suggestions are discussed below.

Firstly, the news reader must have the ability to subscribe to many feeds. Ideally, it should be able to import a list of feeds from another application.

Users should be able to organise feeds using a hierarchy of folders, much like they would normally do with files and emails.

In terms of being able to efficiently view such a large amount of content, experience has shown that most people find a ‘three plane’ window easiest to use. This seperates the list of feeds (including folders) from the list of items and from the actual content.

Useful keyboard shortcuts, such as skipping from one unread item to the next, can greatly increase the user’s speed and efficiency.

Due to the variety of protocol versions and poor adherence to standards (by publishing tools), many feeds available on the internet can cause errors in readers. A good news reader will handle these issues and allow the user to keep reading.

It may be required that feed reading be integrated with email. A few current aggregators (eg FeedDemon) are able to plugin to email applications, but increasingly email applications themselves are offering the ability to view feeds, including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla
Thunderbird.

The platform in use might also be an important factor, since not all applications are available on all platforms.

RSSOwl, a popular freeware news aggregator available for most platforms

Some popular choices

There are many feed reading tools available that allow you to aggregate feeds, but many do not organise feeds very well. Some popular choices include FeedReader, RSSOwl and RSS Bandit. A number of browsers (eg Firefox) will automatically detect if a website has an associated feed and allow you to bookmark it and read the feed, but this does not currently offer the ability to aggregate feeds in one central view.

There are also online aggregation services, such as Bloglines and Google Reader. These are acceptable for low-volume, personal use but in the enterprise environment the best solution would be standalone application software.

All of the readers mentioned thus far are freeware, but any organisation serious about using RSS feeds (perhaps after a successful trial) should consider investing in licensed software, such as NewsGator, which can deliver benefits over freely available applications (eg increased stability and better support).

For more information on some of the more popular news readers, see:

In summary

RSS feeds, and the like, can be very useful tools in the enterprise environment. They offer the ability to provide staff with a great deal of information in an easily manageable way. Specific communication requirements, such as within project teams, can also be satisfied using feeds.

Best of all, those publishing content within the enterprise will find feeds easier to produce and manage.

Tags: feeds, intranets, news, rss

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