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