There has been much talk over the last few days about Enterprise RSS, and whether it’s dead, still being born, or alive and well. Since I’ve got a pretty unique view into this particular industry, I thought I’d write some thoughts and try to give you a more clear picture of what’s really happening.

First, let me get this out of the way – RSS use in the enterprise is definitely alive and well. But it’s not in the obvious places. No one is writing articles talking about how their desktop feed readers are revolutionizing the way they do business. No one is talking about how they’re retiring their Exchange servers because so much content is delivered via RSS instead of email (and in fact, email is alive and well). No one is saying “if I only had Google Reader behind my firewall, I could save millions of dollars.” Few companies even say their users are clamoring for some sort of enterprise RSS application.

So if not all of that, then what?

My team and I, collectively, have detailed conversations with at least 50 different large companies every week, talking about the real problems they do want to solve. Many of these include 10 or more people on their side, ranging from IT folks to business owners with line-of-business responsibility. And these conversations rarely start with any mention of enterprise RSS. These include:

• Portal enhancement. They want to pull additional content into their portal to make it more useful, or get content out of the portal to distribute in some other way. Or in many cases, they want to add personalized content capabilities to the portal. A while back, an analyst told me “this could be the technology that saves the corporate portal.” Indeed – that scenario is playing out today.
• Alerting. There are many use cases where folks want to alert certain groups or individuals of a specific event. For example, we have a large bank that uses our system to deliver fraud alerts to teller desktops, replacing a legacy system that worked via fax and paper. Incredible efficiency gains and cost savings.
• Competitive tracking. Or tracking any other external news for that matter – many companies wish to track media mentions and online conversations about themselves, their competitors, or anything else; once they have this information, then, they need to filter and distribute it appropriately. Increasingly, these systems are being used as a replacement for high-end premium content services. We have a large bank who reduced their premium content subscription expenses by over $1M per year by using our solutions – we’re talking about real savings here.
• Knowledge capture. In large companies, mountains of information are created every day, in many different systems. If there is some way to collect all of this information, and surface it in appropriate places, the content’s value is multiplied.
• Social networking. More and more, companies are investigating the idea of implementing social networking within the enterprise. The use cases for this are numerous; we have a large PR firm, for example, who uses this to manage their talent globally. A global advertising firm uses this technology to connect not only the people working on a specific account, but also others in the company who might have relevant experience or interests; it’s amazingly effective.
• Collaboration. This is sort of a catch-all, I suppose…but it’s a popular use for this technology. For example, one of largest banks in the world is using our system to unify groups of people who are on different communication systems (due to acquisitions and such); their analysis indicates rolling this out will be much faster and cheaper than attempting to unify their email systems in 2009, and provide other benefits such as social connections.

For any of these specific problems, RSS forms the underlying plumbing to transfer content around the organization. And if you can track the user interactions with the content, using enterprise RSS infrastructure, very rich data is collected – and the combination of the content plus this interaction data forms the underlying foundation for a social computing solution. One that can even form relationships based on implicit behavior, rather than explicit actions.

An interesting tidbit – of the content recently added to NewsGator Online, 40% of it is content related to social computing (e.g. Twitter updates, Facebook feeds, etc.). In the enterprise, this percentage can be even higher in active social computing environments. But the point is, RSS (and associated enterprise infrastructure) is increasingly used as the basis for social networking and collaboration.

From a business perspective, momentum for all of this is accelerating dramatically. As Brad mentioned, NewsGator added over 30 paying enterprise customers in Q4 2008 – most of whom were large Fortune 2000 companies (there is some breakdown by industry in this press release). These enterprise installations (plus ongoing maintenance) represent about 75% of NewsGator’s revenue, the rest coming from our enterprise SaaS offerings. Enterprise RSS-related infrastructure, including social computing, is growing quickly in demand.

RSS in the enterprise is not about “reading feeds.” It’s more about enterprise integration, search, feedback, etc. It’s about extending the value of existing systems, and leveraging efficient content distribution and tracking into new applications (e.g. social computing) as well as existing applications (e.g. portal enhancement). It’s not about installing FeedDemon on every desktop to enable folks to read content.

And, thus, it’s hard to see from the outside. But it’s there, forever an enabler, making new things possible. It’s enterprise infrastructure. And it’s in more places than you probably think.

It is sometimes very difficult to persuade colleagues to share documents online when you are working remotely.

Everybody is comfortable with email – logging onto an online project management service appears to be a long winded way of sending a document, or updating the status of a project.

The problem with email – is that everyone has to CC everyone else to stay on top of the status of a project. And when it comes to collaborating on text documents, the marking facilities of MS word can be daunting. Why not have one document in one place where everyone edits the same document – (see the video below).

There are many excellent collaboration tools, but one of the easiest is the totally free Google docs. Have a look at this video to get a quick idea of the benefits.

From the official Google blog

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA]

If everyone were to use Google docs, you could also share calendars and notes, and chat with Gtalk. But the problem is that not everybody has a gmail account (yet), and Google’s free tools are not all on the same page.

A more professional alternative is BaseCamp (free and paid versions).

After logging in, you post messages and comments, upload documents, collaborate on text revision, create to-do lists and chat with members of the team. BaseCamp uses Milestones, essentially a calendar which can have to-do lists and messages associated with each item. It’s a bit like a private blog where everyone invited is on the same page (literally). The only problem with BaseCamp is that it may take a few hours for technophobe’s to get up to speed (but its not complicated).

A simple alternative I have been using for years for managing website’s, is a private Wordpress blog for all the editors. Upload documents, make posts about text changes or let each other know what you are thinking. A supervisor can then keep an eye on the overall project, and any revision requests will be visible to anyone visiting the blog. No need for endless CC’d emails.

One of the beauties of the Wordpress blog approach is the bookmarklet widget for editing a web site.

Drag a link (the widget) into your bookmarks from the control panel. Now if you want some text edits done on the site, highlight the text in question, and click the bookmark. A new blog post will be made in the maintenance blog, with the highlighted text already filled in. Now copy this text and past it just below, then make your text changes to the copied text – et viola. A new post is made with a link to the page in question and the text edits all ready for approval. Anybody else who wants to make revisions can do so in the comments.

Wordpress uses categories for each post. So if you set up the default as “edit” and perhaps a few others such as “approved” “urgent” and “completed”. The webmaster can then go ahead with any edits to the site after they reach a certain status and mark them as “completed” when the site has been updated. Everybody knows what’s going on.

Not quite as sophisticated as the BaseCamp approach, but not too complicated for the tech-shy editor who doesn’t want direct access to the content management system or an editor who has to go through an approval process.

One disadvantage of this approach over BaseCamp, is that a Wordpress blog will need two sets of logins to make it totally private. One to get past any security features and another to log into your blog account. Sometimes this is too much for the busy editor without a password management tool.