Enterprise RSS

OpenSocial, Didja Hear!? and Enterprise 2.0

Some days I imagine the internet must want to take a deep breath and just rest for a while. With Google announcing OpenSocial, a huge stream of blog posts have been pouring down the "pipes".

Within the flood of blog posts, you might have seen NewsGator's name bobbing along with something called Didja Hear!? We were very pleased when Google asked us if we would like to be an early participant in this program, and we used the power of our Widget Framework and our experience from building NewsFriends for Facebook to create Didja Hear!? which pulls the best video and graphic content out of the seven million posts we process each day and makes it easy for users to share these videos and their comments. Here's how it looks in Orkut:

This application ends up being something like the Web 2.0 equivalent of a water-cooler chat with a great conversation starter. We recommend content in categories like movies, music, sports, celebrities, televesion, and gadgets and users send them on to friends or reply to videos and podcasts shared by their friends. So we leverage NewsGator's back end to select great content, and we leverage your social network to highlight the content that is most compelling for you.

So what does all this have to do with Enterprise 2.0? In some ways, Didja Hear!? has more in common with our Social Sites for SharePoint than it does with NewsFriends for Facebook. Just as Social Sites allows for an administrator to select content to make the experience more compelling, Didja Hear!? uses our editor's tools from the Widget Framework to get the best content by automatically filtering and sorting the content. We can also promote specific stories and eliminate unwanted ones.

But the real power happens when user behavior and relationships are added to the mix. The explicit actions of my friends to share content are the most powerful and accurate filters available. But we also take advantage of less explicit feedback. By tracking user actions including clicking links, forwarding articles, saving articles, etc, we can improve relevance. Even if my friends don't actually send me a story, the fact that they spent time interacting with it suggests that it's more valuable to me.

This is true in both consumer and enterprise applications. OpenSocial exposes information about a user, her friends, and her activities. This is exactly the same kind of information that is available in SharePoint or Connections. We leverage that information to provide the best content for a user, and we extend that information by adding in the reading, tagging, subscribing, saving, and other attention data to provide better connections of people and content.

This same story applies in our Syndication Services business where we leverage the same social content intelligence in our platform to provide the best possible widget experiences.

At the end of the day, all of this "2.0" stuff comes down to taking advantage of data that users provide for their own benefit to produce more benefit for them and others. Social and content consumption data are both extremely powerful - combined they produce a truly exceptional value in both business and individual user scenarios. And after the flood of posts has subsided and the "pipes" of the internet groan in relief, getting real value from OpenSocial will be the center of attention.

Brian Kellner
VP, Product Management

P.S. If you want to understand OpenSocial better, read Marc Andreesen's post. He gives a great overview of the technology as well as broader thought about its impact.

Cumulative Advantage in the Enterprise

In a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine piece, Sociology professor Duncan Watts writes about his research on consumer markets. He reveals how people make decisions in a social way and how products and concepts become wildly successful through so-called cumulative advantage.

While not exactly an analogous scenario to an enterprise, the article got me thinking about RSS consumption and distribution. In particular, Duncan describes how surprise hits come to be through the cumulative advantage effect: "That if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still."

One of the challenges within an enterprise is truly grasping what information the individuals that make up the enterprise are consuming. If we pause for a moment and consider a top-down view of managing an enterprise, the ability to draw on analytics contained in email systems, CRM systems, workflow systems and so on, you have a generalized concept of a Business Intelligence system. But BI systems only provide top-down views -- to the few.

What's important in this case is a second portion of Duncan's insight, and he lured me in with the general assumption "that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another." (Just look at those teenagers, who want to differentiate but all wear the same clothes.) Importantly, he concludes that "people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the ‘best’ of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing."

This is a significant factor in the growth of social computing in Web 2.0, and by extension, in Enterprise 2.0. Because individuals naturally are drawn to choices that others make in products or ideas, the enhancement of lateral relationships is a natural evolution of the way enterprises conduct internal business.

In his research on the popularity of hit songs, Duncan brings up how "introducing social influence into human decision-making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable." Tying in enterprise RSS into the picture, when new concepts, ideas, business processes or communications are exposed in RSS format -- through blogs, workflow tools, or wikis -- that information needs to be delivered to an employee. Some might come in email, some are only visible on a web page -- it's unpredictable. Over time, though, some of these internal communications will take off, and both managers and peers need to be aware, but also be influencers of the success of the gems floating around the enterprise.

In the end, the ability to provide a top-down view of what ideas are floating around in an enterprise, but also a bottom-up view of what concepts might be benefiting from (or not) cumulative advantage within an enterprise demonstrate the important role of an enterprise RSS server. Oh, and by the way, check out the exciting and innovative new features in NewsGator Enterprise Server 2.0, like social reporting and tag clouds, to help your enterprise discover those gems.

Ashley Roach
NGES Product Manager

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