Organisational inertia means we’re saddled with an ageing, vulnerable browser across our hospitals and key government departments. That’s not good

via Why the NHS can’t get its browser act together  Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. I don’t have Internet Explorer 6 installed on my computer, so I can’t verify this first hand, but illogical it seems not and a simple Twitter search shows multiple people confirming the news. Heck, some are even downright ecstatic over the news.

The online video behemoth is pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome (twice on the same page even, unsurprisingly), Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives.

With the impending move, YouTube follows in the footsteps of that other Web 2.0 poster child, Digg, which recently hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. Digg’s User Experience Architect Mark Trammell at the time wrote that the site is strongly considering removing essential features like digging and commenting for IE6 users. He explained that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.

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.

The web has not stopped evolving in the last 7 years. The article from Sitepoint below, highlights that web developers jump backwards through hoops so that sites still render reasonably when viewed by IE6,  perhaps it’s time to move forward without this monkey on our backs. My latest site drops a lot of features for IE6, I see no reason to add-on many layers of complexity simply to  include some minor page styling. But with such a high percentage of users, basic page layout in IE6 is still, of course, a high priority.

One has to wonder why IT departments are not upgrading browsers? IT departments are the ones to blame, they make the decisions for most people, and they seem to have a poor opinion of IE7. There seems to be some prevailing notion that IE7 is not an improvement on IE6. One opinion I heard recently; was that IE7 was very slow. But I think the real issue is that a lot of people simply don’t like the UI (“User Interface”).

I believe Internet Explorer 7 made a major mistake when it changed the UI – If IE7 still looked the same as IE6, I think the upgrade process would have proceeded at a much faster pace. Your average user doesn’t want to learn to drive a new browser, and most people think the features of the browser are all in the UI. If both browsers looked the same, most people would not have noticed the major advantages of IE7, the increased security, the better rendering of CSS layouts, and painlessly dropped IE6.

Is It Time to Ditch IE6?

On August 27, 2001, almost exactly 7 years ago, Microsoft unleashed Internet Explore 6 upon the world. Despite version 7 having been out now for almost two years, and version 8 already in public beta, usage of the 2001 release remains strong. W3Counter reports that it is still the most popular browser in the world at 34.6% of all visits, while TheCounter.com has it second to IE7, but only barely and still commanding a whopping 36% market share.

Because so many people still use the older version of Internet Explorer, many web sites have made the choice to continue supporting it (including SitePoint — where about 12% of our visitors still come to us using IE6). But is it perhaps time to ditch IE6 support and start forcing people to upgrade?

Web application developer 37signals made the decision to drop IE6 support in July (actual support for Microsoft’s last generation browser ceased on August 15). “IE 6 can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can,” wrote 37signals of the decision. “Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.”

According to 37signals, supporting IE6 was holding them back. And 37signals isn’t alone in their dislike of IE6. In 2006, a few months before Microsoft released their last major browser, PC World magazine ranked Internet Explorer 6 as the 8th worst tech product of all time, citing its terrible track record when it comes to security.

Security is such a big issue for IE6, that one blogger recently reported that 95% of all bots accessing his site use Internet Explorer 6 as their user-agent. “Most blog spam comes from bots that either fake or, as a trojan, use Internet Explorer 6 of infected systems,” he wrote, ultimately deciding to block IE6 completely to alleviate the blog spam problem.

Of course, security isn’t the only reason web developers are sour on IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is also dismal when it comes to standards compliance. So why do people continue to use it? As Nick La wrote a year ago, the reason people still use IE6 is that developers go out of their way to make web sites work in it. So most people don’t realize that IE6 isn’t a good browser.

“We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven’t realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks,” La wrote, urging people to drop support for IE6.

If you are not up to speed with RSS, here is a primer.

RSS means Really Simple Syndication – actually it doesn’t matter what it means – all it is is a way of scouring the web and pulling all the information into one place without having to go to each and every site.

Its very powerful. Say you want to keep an eye on what your customers are saying about you, or your rivals. Would you like to be alerted whenever you are mentioned in the news, and then track upcoming items? Are there industries you want to track, software you need to keep up to date, blogs you want to follow. A good RSS strategy can keep you aware of developing trends, help you gain competitive insight and keep you up to date with the latest buzz.

You need an RSS reader, a piece of software that will gather all this information for you and present it on your desktop, or in your browser, or in your email inbox, every morning (noon or night).

The excellent free online Google reader is a good start, but if you want a more professional approach – the even better FeedDemon created by the highly respected Nick Bradbury is worth every penny (less than 30 bucks US). So start yourself off with a Google account, or download FeedDemon and lets see what we can do with it.

Every respectable site produces an RSS feed these days, simply put, its a list of the latest pages, including a short (or full) excerpt. So the first thing you need to do is to tell your RSS reader to follow that site and its RSS feed. The BBC for instance produces a number of feeds for a range of topics. Go to the BBC site, read the primer, and choose a feed by clicking a link in the right column.

If you have set up FeedDemon with the Firefox browser, it will know you have clicked on an RSS feed and pop up to ask you if you want to subscribe. Otherwise you will need to copy the link and paste it into your reader. Most Feed readers offer a way to integrate themselves with your browser, but all you really need is the link to the feed. Feed links use a small orange button, sometimes labeled RSS or XML.

OK so not very interesting so far, you visit a number of sites and subscribe to their RSS feeds, your feed reader will visit them every few hours and pull the latest pages into your reader. FeedDemon can be set up to run in the background and pop up a notice when new items arrive, if you are interested, you can follow the link to the site that produced it. No big deal, but still much faster than visiting hundreds of sites every week.

It gets much more interesting

A lot of search engines produce RSS feeds for the search you have just run. So if you could define all your interests in a variety of search terms, then plug these terms into your RSS reader – you would end up with the web, personalized, customized just for you or your company, and delivered to your desktop or browser.

And its not just Search, the so called web2.0 sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati, all produce feeds from their tags and categories. Go to http://del.icio.us/tag/health for instance – see the orange square in your browsers address bar, or the link at the bottom to RSS feed for this page.

OK so “health” may be a bit broad, but don’t worry, your feed reader is going to discard old news for you. But lets narrow these down using a variety of search engines. Lets do a few step by step searches within a certain medical interest range.

Lets try Google News UK for “NHS” (National Health Service):
Here is the search on Google.
And here is the RSS Feed that you can find on the same page.

Now lets head over to Google blog search and plug in “Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital”.
Lets see what the blogs are saying. Hey – these are patients talking about their experiences in hospital!
We don’t want to run this search again tomorrow, so we have another RSS Feed for our reader which will only show us the latest items.

Lets try something slightly different with FeedDemon – Press the “Subscribe” to feed button, choose “find new feeds about a specific topic” from the menu, and enter “healthcare marketing” (for instance). FeedDemon presents a list of blog titles – one of which catches my eye, its called “The Healthcare Marketing Blog” and subscribing to it’s RSS feed is one click away. FeedDemon has done all the work for me.

These examples are Health and NHS related, but the subjects could cover business or personal interests, anything at all – feed readers allow you to compartmentalize your interests through tags or folders, and if you had the foresight to purchase FeedDemon, you could have done all those searches very easily from within FeedDemon, then filed them into your “Medical” folder. FeedDemon goes much further, with the ability to watch folders for keywords, organize with news bins, and includes a comprehensive search tool.

Corporate blogging is now part of the scene, I suspect that corporate blogging is a slight sham if the marketing department is involved. But a company can not afford to ignore its customers- and they are happily pronouncing their opinions in their own Blogs, Wikis and Forums. All of them have their own RSS feeds, and most allow you to enter your own comments.

And of course – here is the RSS feed for W3Design.

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.