Enterprise RSS

Fixing Blind Spots

A few days ago, fellow geek and rock-star developer Scott Hanselman posted about adjusting your side mirrors to eliminate blind spots when you drive. I have a little commute each day (only about ½ hour), but it was long enough for me to get bored yesterday. So rather than pay attention to my driving, I started playing with the side-view mirrors. I moved them way out and a little down, and it was interesting. Now this wasn’t extreme on the passenger side mirror, which is farther away from me, and so the movement of the mirror didn’t affect the field of view as much. But the change in the driver’s side was dramatic!

Most of my commute is multi-lane highway, so I got the chance to tweak the placement of the mirror. I adjusted it so that the overlap between the rear-view mirror and side mirror is tiny. A car moving up the left-hand lane from behind me is in my rear-view mirror most of the way, and then as they move up to about five feet from my bumper, they are in both my rear-view and side mirrors. When they are about even with my bumper, their grill and headlights are right in the middle of my side mirror, and they look huge. The result is no blind spot.

Two interesting observations occurred to me. One was that it is a little distracting to have so much movement of such optically large objects in that side-view mirror. The other is that I still look over my shoulder when I change lanes. I just can’t help it. I know that I have really good coverage in the mirrors, and yet all those years of driving have just made it a habit I can’t break.

After I got tired of playing with the mirrors and driving like a Californian (that is to say speeding up and slowing down randomly and changing lanes a lot) to test the mirror placement, I started thinking to fill the time. It’s a bad habit. Everything is an analogy to me. Abstract everything to the level that it’s useful for instruction or problem-solving. It makes me a better designer and architect and is one of the things that keeps my employer from being too upset about my other, less useful, quirks.

Where are my blind spots? Where are yours? There’s the root of a joke there somewhere, kind of like a lame public speaker saying, “Everyone who can’t hear me, raise your hand.” If we could see them, they wouldn’t be blind spots. Yet that’s not completely true, either. While we may not know what’s in the blind spot, we often know exactly where it is. This is the reason for my looking over my shoulder when I change lanes. Even after I adjusted my mirrors to cover that spot, years of experience still tell me that I’m missing something unless I look.

I’m the same way with the information flow in my work and home life. I have a lot of information stores that I rely on, yet I know that I can’t keep up with all of them. This is frustrating because I know that hidden in there are little gems that would make my life and work easier, but the value proposition is just not there to justify sifting through the dross. I need more efficient filtering, but to date a lot of that has been in the form of word-based searches and filters. This works to some extent, but our dear old language has so many ways to express the same ideas that it, like my old mirror alignment, had lots of overlap and left some pretty significant blind spots. I want something better.

So we built it. That is, after all, what we do. Working with ideas from the team and product management, we started to pull together some of the technology that has been in the Enterprise product for a long time but has never been obvious or used in quite this way before. We’ve always looked for correlations between the interests of individuals. Likewise, we pay attention to what people pay attention to, aggregating meta-information about how users and groups of users deal with the flow of data. Much of this has been in the product from day one, and we have been supplementing it as it has evolved.

Now with the 2.0 release, we’re ready to start using this to cover the blind spots in your information flow. It’s like having a personal assistant who not only skims everything out there and pulls in stuff that they know from past experience might be important, but also polls your team, company and the world in general to find out what’s interesting to folks like you.

As I use these new features, I’m amazed at the subtle and yet profound change in my information management. New ideas are just waiting for me there in my folders; some from sources I’ve long known and trusted, others from new and unexpected places. I’m seeing more and searching less.

Does this mean I’ll delete all my subscriptions and let the system just surface what it knows I’m interested in? Probably not right away. I’m still looking over my shoulder to make sure that I’m not missing anything big and important sneaking up on me. But I have a feeling that if the system keeps surfacing the right information automatically, I’ll have different things to think about on my commute.

Lane Mohler
Director – Enterprise Applications

Isn’t That Free, or What the Heck Do I Need That For?

When I tell my friends or folks at networking events that I help create enterprise-grade RSS solutions, I sometimes get responses like: What the heck do I need that for? Or: Isn't that free? I’ll bet if you stumbled on this post, you could be asking the same questions.

Consumer Internet technologies only translate so far for Enterprise use. As an example, let's assume you used a consumer email system for a 100-person enterprise. First of all, it would be really hard and very painful to discover the email addresses of the other employees. Second, each user would have to create individual versions of mailing lists. Third, no reporting options would be available. Lastly, each user would have to create his/her own account when they joined the firm.

These are the kinds of problems that crop up with any number of consumer technologies in the enterprise. Apply these comparisons to instant messaging, calendaring, wikis, blogs, and, you guessed it, RSS readers.

So, let's compare using consumer RSS in the enterprise with what's provided in an enterprise-grade solution:

Consumer	Enterprise
Add feeds by each user.	Feeds can be added by the user, or provisioned by an administrator to individual users or groups of users.
Individual user creates own account.	Accounts are created by integration with a corporate directory solution like Active Directory or LDAPv3 compliant directory.
Share clipped articles by passing around a URL.	Group-based clippings folders are exposed in the reader.
Reporting, sorry.	View reports that show what users are reading, what actions they are taking on posts, and which feeds are popular among the enterprise users.
External feeds only.	Since an enterprise solution lives behind your company's firewall, feeds that are generated out of portals, CRM, and other systems can be used.
Discover feeds that are important to me at work.	Taxonomies, tagging, ratings are all enterprise features that make it easy to discover feeds that are important to me.
Persistent searches can only be performed on external feeds.	Setting up keyword searches that turn into feeds can be performed against external or internal feeds.
No secured feeds.	Password protected feeds can be added directly by a user or an administrator.

As you can see, there are solid features that enterprises need in order to successfully deploy RSS aggregation technology. When you stack them up next to each other, that free reading experience starts looking a lot more expensive in lost productivity or missing enterprise-grade features for your users and IT.

Take a look at NewsGator enterprise products to dig deeper into enterprise RSS.

Ashley Roach
NGES Product Manager

Virtual Wendy

When I started my first job in the corporate world many years ago, my boss’s office had two rooms. He sat in the second room. The only way into that room was through the first room. Wendy sat in the first room.

Wendy did a lot of things (including keeping me out of my boss’s office when he didn’t want to see me). One of the coolest things that I saw Wendy do was act as an information router. Wendy took in a lot of e-mail, phone calls, voice mails, faxes, regular mail and internal routing slips. (Yes – I’m that old. This is basically a document with a checklist of names attached. Each person on the list was supposed to read the document, check their name and pass it on.) Then she decided what things belonged together, what things were most important and what things could be ignored altogether and presented the result to my boss.

In many ways, I think of RSS as my “virtual Wendy.” Although I haven’t been able to include the “friendly smile” and “full cup of coffee” features in our enterprise product (yet), it does help me tremendously to focus on the right information at the right time.

With our enterprise RSS solution, I can:

• Easily categorize: Articles come in feeds, so they automatically go into their own “folders.” I can group feeds into folders to further organize, but the real value is that the initial organization is automatic.

• Read what I want where I want: Some of my feeds go to my desktop notifier that pops up to draw my attention because I know the content is important. Some feeds go to my mobile device so I can read during times that are otherwise unproductive -- I actually like checkout lines! Some of my feeds go to my e-mail client because that’s where I spend a good chunk of my time. I can quickly scan the feeds in spare moments (like waiting for a phone conference to start).

• Read things once: Someone told me that a key time-management trick was to touch each piece of paper only once. (Anyone who has seen my office knows that I have failed to learn this lesson.) But with our enterprise solution, it’s a quick decision to mark something read or choose to save it. I suspect that Wendy forced the same behavior for my boss by showing him something and then taking it away immediately.
What’s really exciting is that with our 2.0 release that I’m using internally, we actually have some advantages over Wendy. Not only does our enterprise solution know what I like and show me information accordingly, it also knows what my co-workers like. So the system is able to suggest specific articles to me based on what my co-workers have done.

For example, if someone else in the product-management group has saved an article that talks about our product and someone in sales has forwarded that article on to a prospect, the system predicts that article is more important to me and makes it more visible. For Wendy to do the same thing, she would have to run around the entire company at the speed of light and get input from everyone that had an affinity with me.

The 2.0 release of NGES has many other cool advantages over Wendy as well. It gives me the ability to take advantage of the tagging done by others in filtering views of articles. It lets me create new feeds for any article anyone tags as being related to a topic: e.g. give me a feed that only contains articles that have been tagged as being about “FeedDemon”. It lets me easily view reports on my own reading and the reading of others and more.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll never have a real Wendy to help route my information. That seems like a luxury of business days from long ago. So it’s very cool that I have a tool that does some of the things that a Wendy would have done – and some things that no Wendy ever could accomplish! And having a tool like that gives me time to get my own darn coffee!

Brian Kellner
NewsGator Product Mgt./Consumer GM