I’ve clearly got a lot to learn about Enterprise 2.o. For example, what exactly is the point of standardising on one mandated brand of RSS reader software for every employee in an organisation?
In my understanding an RSS reader is a personal productivity tool, a way of organising the way a person works with their chosen reading matter. But people do not all consume information in the same way. Some like to organise everything into neat folders, others prefer to have everything in one big pile with the latest at the top. Some like to quickly scan through everything and then deal with the most important first, others prefer to work through their incoming notifications one at a time. You get the picture. There are also preferences for the style of presentation, because some people have different eyesight capabilities. For different folk, certain styles and coloured fonts work better than others or they need specific colour backgrounds to work from. Some like three panes visible at once, others a single paned window. Some work with one highly customised computer, others need to be able to log in from anywhere on a variety of machines.
So I can’t work out yet what would really be the problem facing an Enterprise IT department if people were allowed to choose for themselves which RSS reader they prefer to use. What are the benefits of standardisation, and to whom?
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
It’s a good point Andy (and I say that as someone tasked with “standardising” on an RSS reader for our company in 2008). I think you’re right about the personal productivity thing, but the main benefit I see – to both an organisation and its employees – of standardisation is the ability to aggregate.
By this I mean the ability for an employee to see what the most popular feeds amongst co-workers are, for instance. Or being able to search other people’s feeds and not just their own. Public web readers like Bloglines already do this, and I find it incredibly useful to be able to tap into the “wisdom of the crowd” as well as use it for my own personal benefit.
I suspect, however, that most companies are simply looking at standardisation from the point of view of ease of deployment, maintenance and control, and not from the point of view of the end user, and that is a shame.
All the personalisation you mention re: structure, layout, styles, etc. can certainly all be accommodated with software that supports custom themes and styles for each person.
Where I work is up to the individual to decide which RSS reader (or any other software) he uses.
I think that is quite personal and shouldn’t be standardized. People are different and give priority to different features.
Enterprise RSS isn’t just about the “reader” software, its also about having an RSS server that allows you to tap into the social aspects mentioned by Niall and easy integration with other enterprise systems to generate useful RSS content. The other issue is that in terms of broad support for secure feeds, the RSS world is pretty immature so for the moment an enterprise-based solution is the best way to go. The ideal enterprise solution should also enable multiple access points for consuming RSS feeds (desktop alerts, screen savers, via email client, via instant messaging client, and Web-based client), should work inside and outside the firewall and do it in a way that means you only have to read something once. It shouldn’t be about locking you into one interface, but at the moment it might mean a set of mandated tools because of the secure feed limitations. Of course if secure feeds aren’t issue, pick what ever reader you like.
Thanks for all three insights. I’m not well clued up about how secure feeds work but I believe you’d need to be logged into the Virtual Private Network in order for your RSS reader to have any kind of access to the feeds produced in there? As for aggregation and republishing, well I think that can be abstracted beyond the need for any kind mandated software through the use of standard formats, ie OPML.