Enterprise RSS

3 Things You Should Know About NewsGator

Most people identify NewsGator with our market leading desktop RSS client software and as one of the first online RSS reader services. What most people don't realize is that the consumer client software and services are only one part of our business. Here's 3 things you should know about NewsGator:

1) We have over 39 separate products, including Facebook and Google OpenSocial applications, a comprehensive enterprise products business, and a content syndication services business. We have a product called Social Sites that runs on top of Microsoft Sharepoint to deliver a "facebook behind the firewall" capability, and we work with other enterprise 2.0 companies to deliver suite offerings, including Intel's SuiteTwo.

2) Our datacenter processes over 1.8 million feeds daily, resulting in over 7 million new content items. We archive content and have 3 terabytes of content that we make available to our partners. The archive content is increasingly being used to power features for discovery and relevancy of content.

3) Some of the largest media brands in the world use NewsGator's syndication service to "widget'ize" their content, including USAToday, and The Discovery Channel. We deliver over 100 million widget impressions a month and our media clients typically achieve a clickthrough rate that is double what they get through other channels. You can use the free version of this service to create your own widgets.

OpenSocial Developer Journal : Blind Interior Decorating

My wife is a huge fan of HGTV. It’s actually pretty cool to see how different a room can look when a skilled designer goes to work on it. But how would this turn out if the designer couldn’t see the room? Building applications for OpenSocial is somewhat like this.

Container sites are supposed to provide some space on the “profile” page for a user and another “canvas” page that has more space. But just how much space will there be? What color is the site? What fonts are used? Can the user modify size, color, font, etc?

These aren’t new problems for web design. Users run their computers at different screen resolutions for example. But now we have an additional layer of complexity in trying to understand how the container might vary from site to site.

In general, this pushes application developers to go for simpler implementations. The blind interior decorator is likely to pick neutral colors and small pieces of furniture. But this doesn’t create the best user experience. Another alternative is to build an application solely for one container site. This certainly produces a good user experience, but it doesn’t really leverage OpenSocial. It’s really no different than building to a site-specific set of API’s.

The alternative that we are pursuing for the moment is to make a version of Didja Hear for each container site. This way, we can provide the best possible experience in Plaxo which might look significantly different than the best experience in Orkut. We might size the preview of a video differently. We might show more or fewer videos in the view. We might change the colors or fonts. This gives the best user experience, but at scale we will have a very large number of variations of each application. Developers don’t like this because it makes maintenance much harder.

The other approach is to have some set of API’s that inform the application about how it should look. Discussion started on this in the weeks before OpenSocial was announced. It’s not a simple problem, but it’s necessary in the long run. Otherwise we end up with 100 different Didja Hears and 1000 “beige room” applications.

OpenSocial Developer Journal : Have We Met Before?

NewsGator is all about presenting the right view of your content when and where you want it. An important part of that concept in our RSS readers is synchronization. If I mark a post read on my mobile NewsGator Go! reader, that post is marked read everywhere else. We do this by tieing all of the user activity to a NewsGator account.

Now suppose I were to add Didja Hear (our OpenSocial application) to Plaxo where my user ID might be based on my NewsGator email address. I set some content preferences so Didja Hear only shows videos about movies, television, and music. I start sending videos to friends, making comments, getting videos from them, etc. Later on, I add Didja Hear to Orkut where I log in with my gmail address.

As an application developer, this scenario raises some questions. Should we prompt the user whenever they add our application to see if they have added it before? If we do that, we could link the two accounts. Then we can provide a benefit of keeping the same preference information.

We could take it a step further though as well. In my scenario above, I could possibly see a video sent from a friend on Orkut while viewing Didja Hear in Plaxo. That sounds like a nice benefit for the user – wherever you look at Didja Hear, you see all of your content and interaction from friends. But in addition with us needing to ask the user to connect the dots and the user feeling comfortable with connecting the two accounts, we have another couple of issues.

If my friend Sue in Orkut puts a comment on a video she sent to me, we show that as “Sue says: …”. We don’t store Sue’s actual name in our database. We store her Orkut ID. Now if I’m looking at Didja Hear in Plaxo, the only way we could show “Sue says: … “ is if we store that information. The alternative is for us to display the considerably less social message “Somebody said: … “.

Facebook has an explicit policy forbidding the storage of a user’s personal data for more than 24 hours, and I could see different container sites creating different usage policies around personal data. As an application developer, it would be ideal if there were some standard restrictions that could be applied to profile and friend data consistently from all container sites. For example, a user setting that says “Share my first name only in views outside this site” would be very helpful piece of information.

One small twist remains to be explored in this story, but that’s a subject for a future post. In the meantime, we need to get back to some real OpenSocial development.

OpenSocial Development Journal – Know Your Friends

At NewsGator, we’re happy to have been selected as one of the early developers in the OpenSocial program. It’s been exciting to build our Didja Hear!? application, and we wanted to share some of our thoughts on social networking and the opportunities, questions and challenges of OpenSocial from the application developer point of view. This is the first in a series of posts that cover the issues we are currently addressing.
 
One of the OpenSocial API’s lets us ask who are the friends of a user. This is a powerful and basic capability of any social networking solution. The primary challenge for us as a developer is understanding what a container site really means when they tell us who are the user’s friends.  
 
Imagine you asked ten random people to name all their friends. Each of them is likely to use different criteria in defining what a friend really is.  Some people might answer the question with a statement like, “Well, I only have two really close friends, but I stay in touch with fifty people.”  
 
Within a single social networking site, the answer is likely to be very consistent. But different sites may choose to answer the question differently. When we were building the Didja Hear application, the rule for Orkut’s answer to the question  “Who are Bob’s friends?”, was to respond with Bob’s friends who already have Didja Hear installed! If we contrast this with Facebook, we can get a list of all of a user’s friends and the information about whether or not they have our application installed.  
 
From the point of view of viral distribution, it’s much harder to prompt Bob to send Sue an invitation to add Didja Hear if we don’t know that Sue even exists.  We’ll have a bit more to say about invitations in upcoming posts…
 
The filter that Orkut was considering around providing friend names is just one example. If we are working with a social network that allows more granular concepts than “friend” or “not a friend”, how will they answer when Didja Hear asks? The most precise answer would be for the site to send us the users along with extended data that indicates how close they are (best friend, friend, business associate, friend of a friend, etc). But if every container site does this, it could be overwhelming to deal with the complexity.
 
OpenSocial is very cool and very powerful. It is already making an impact. But underneath powerful, open concepts there are always important details that need to get ironed out. Over the next several posts, we’ll show you more of the questions we’re considering right now.

-- Brian Kellner is VP Products for NewsGator

Tags: NewsGator, Google, OpenSocial, Didja Hear

Live From Defrag!

Day 1 at Defrag turned out to be well worth the trip out here. With approximately 250 people in attendance it is the perfect size to meet pretty much everyone and wtih people like Doc Searls, Brad Feld, Phil Windley, Andrew McAfee, Esther Dyson, and Jeff Clavier in attendance, well you are certain to have some good hallway conversations.

Dave Weinberger opened with a keynote that was insightful and philosophical, my favorite takeways were that "links are not information, links do what information doesn't" and ""words are not carriers of meaning, but pointers to shared understanding" (UPDATE: read Dave's comment on this). What I found fascinating about Weinberger's keynote is that he makes the web and what we are doing with it meaningful in a big picture kind of way.

The panel discussion that followed the keynote featured Jerry Michalski, JP Rangaswami, Joshua Schachter, and our own JB Holston. This discussion covered a lot of ground but one thing that caught my attention was how there is a tension in enterprise organizations between open vs. closed, and young vs. old. It's nothing new to suggest that there is a generational divide that dictates ideology and tools.

Dan Farber posted a summary of the first two keynote sessions.

Michael Barrett has a presentation on security which can be summed up as "web 1.0 security is broken and web 2.0 just adds more stuff that will break". Phil Windley captured the presentation in an appropriately named This Stuff Scares the Hell Out of Me post.

We had an open session slot on the agenda where we broke up into working groups to discuss various topics, such as who owns the data, and platforms, which I participated in. The platform open session was interesting because it illustrated the dramatically evolving nature of what it means to be a platform. One thing we all agreed on is that platforms don't declare themselves to be a platform, what happens is that success with customers creates the conditions by which a application evolves to be a platform.

There was a lot more going on in the platform open session, which could have spawned several blog posts but one thing is clear, the platform game is changing and if you want to play in that world you had better understand the new world order.

Next up was a vendor presentation from BEA, which is a sponsor of the conference. All speculation about their future aside, I really like their Aqualogic product line but wonder if the evolving nature of portals chips away at their market opportunity outside of the large enterprise segment.

I saw Andre Durand and Kimbal Musk, was a great conversation and then Jeff Clavier walked up and we went out for coffee.

I moderated a panel on enterprise mashups with Adam Gross from Salesforce.com and John Crupi from Jackbe. We covered a wide range of topics related to enterprise mashups, including security/governance, APIs, monetization, start page apps, social networking, and user interfaces. I enjoyed this discussion and I believe we may be on the cusp of delivering some cool mashup capabilities to enterprise users.

My mashup panel would have had a larger audience were I not going up against another panel on "social networking the enterprise". It's pretty tough to compete with that session right now so we had maybe 40 people in it, however at the end a couple of guys from a company doing mashups came up to me and commented that we covered some good topics not normally talked about in mashup presentations so I'll take that as a success.

We next had a sponsor challenge from NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker, who I thought did a great job presenting RSS in the enterprise. He's actually very funny, you should book him as a speaker at your next conference.

A highlight of the day is Dick Hardt fragging identity at defrag. It was a new presentation and, as would be expected, very good. I'm sure a slideshare version or video will be up in due time. Esther Dyson gave a presentation about stuff that was way to deep for me to appreciate.

Doc Searls gave a very entertaining presentation on "customer reach vs. vendor grasp", which can be summed up as how little control over your personal profile data you really don't have. Doc is insightful and pointed in his presentation, which like Weinberger, usually takes days of thought to fully grasp. Smart people like Doc think at a different clock rate.

One slide that said a lot more than the words allowed: "we lost more than our identities at the end of the Enlightenment, jobs replaced crafts". Doc makes an important point about identity should mean something more than a name and attributes, identity should reflect a transactional relationship between systems and people.

Lastly, Doc's project around Vendor Relationship Management (project VRM) addresses the way in which we interact with companies. VRM is misnamed though given that in enterprise software circles the term has been used for years and means something completely different, although upon second thought it's really the same thing with different players (b2b instead of b2c)

Last up today is Ross Mayfield, who had great news this week about Socialtext raising more money and getting a new CEO. Ross is never at a loss for entertaining presentation titles is closing out the day with "What to do in Denver when your corporation is dead". I'm running out of battery so I'll have to deprive you of Ross' wisdom for now.

PS- Here's some images on Flickr taken through the day.

--- Jeff Nolan is VP Corporate Development for NewsGator.

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.

The Magic (of) Quadrants

Gartner Group published a report titled Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software (ID#G00151493) this week. The money shot in any Gartner report is, you guessed it, the magic quadrant.

What makes this quadrant so fascinating is that there are no leaders according to Gartner, and only two who qualify as visionary but in reality only one (more on that later). In fact, according to Gartner, there are only two companies that are above the line with regard to ability to execute. Well that's kinda interesting.

Here at NewsGator this report was the topic of much discussion. We were debating our decision not to participate in the group of companies Nikos Drakos included in the analysis and we tried to make sense of the large cluster of companies in the niche sector.

The Gartner view of team collaboration and social software, and this is just an observation and not a judgement, is still rooted in the blogs and wikis mindset, which is not what we do so according to how Gartner is segmenting the market there really wasn't much upside for us.

We believe the market is much broader than Gartner is allowing, encompassing content relevancy, discovery, and surfacing (what you need, when you need it, and in an app that can use it), user profile data, user initiated action, such as sharing and tagging, coupled with user generated content. Of course, were Gartner to include the full spectrum of collaboration offerings then the niche sector in this quadrant would be overwhelmed with companies.

The other observation I would make about this quadrant, which is that several of these companies are in fact represented in several places. Our friends at Socialtext participate in Intel's SuiteTwo, along with NewsGator and SixApart, and also over on Microsoft's Sharepoint with a bolt on wiki, as does Atlassian.

In retrospect, not participating in this report was basically the right decision. This market is in the early stages of development, and as Nikos rightly concludes, it's early enough to declare there to be no leaders. Consolidation is inevitable and the companies that successfully offer an integrated suite of products will ultimately move to the leader sector.

This validates our decision to engage with ecosystems as opposed to creating buckets of functions that overlap with what our customers platform vendors are offering, and the already mentioned SuiteTwo package is a great example of how an integrated suite can capture visionary status through offering a best of breed suite with integrated administration capabilities.

We made a strategic decision to partner with Microsoft on not only Sharepoint with our Social Sites product but also the broader Microsoft stack with our NewsGator Enterprise Server and this enables us to move in the market with the ease of knowing we are benefiting from the platform investments and customer reach that Microsoft enables.

Gartner is right, there are no true leaders in this market right now but the market is accelerating and leaders will emerge in the next 12 months based on core product strength, partner development, and of course, customer acquisition.

-- Jeff Nolan is VP Corporate Development for NewsGator Technologies.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Gartner, NewsGator, wikis

Enterprise 2.0 and the Cynicism Checklist

Many years ago, I worked for the CIO of a $2 billion corporation. I was pretty enthusiastic about implementing new technologies, but a lot of the staff seemed pretty cynical.

There usually was good reason for their cynicism. If you believe the frequently mentioned statistic that more than 50 percent of all IT projects fail to meet their goals, you can see part of the reason. For a lot of operational IT people, a good day is when nothing breaks. Doing something new or different often breaks things. So if you combine the limited chance for upside success on most projects with the pretty strong downside potential of breaking things, cynicism starts to look like a helpful survival trait.

I remember many times when a business stakeholder would come to IT full of enthusiasm for some new technology. Often he or she had done lots of “research” and were ready to buy! In many cases, it was my job to be between this boundless optimism and the hardened pessimism of an IT professional who saw it as a train wreck.

So what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0? The answer is in the “Cynicism Checklist.”

The Cynicism Checklist was my way of testing for the real business value. An IT person can have a good day (can even get a promotion) by implementing a successful technology, so many IT folks are actually open to ideas that pass the test. Right now, a lot of business stakeholders are exploring Enterprise 2.0. If I were having the conversation using the Cynicism Checklist, I would expect the conversation to go something like this.

Me: What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
Stakeholder: E-mail is just not working for us. We’re buried in e-mail. We need different ways to communicate and collaborate.

Me: How does this Enterprise 2.0 stuff solve that?
Stakeholder: Well, it gets the stuff out of e-mail that shouldn’t be there – collaboration happens in collaboration tools and information, and notifications get nicely organized and distributed in RSS.

Me: Why will this be successful? Why will people use this instead of doing things the same way?
Stakeholder: Well, the thing is, half the members of my staff are already using these tools. The latest college hires came in knowing them and shared them with others. But they are using tools that are running outside the company, and those tools don’t do some things, and I don’t think IT would like it. But the ease of use and success of these tools are just too compelling to ignore.

If the business value was clear and believable after these three questions, the cynicism from the rest of IT was greatly reduced. The cool thing that I’ve been seeing over the last year is that, at many companies, the project to implement Web 2.0 technologies inside the company is being driven by IT. These innovation teams see the same thing as my business stakeholder above – the ease of use and benefit of these technologies is bringing a lot of business value (and a chance for positive recognition).

A little cynicism is good. I’ve seen plenty of technology ideas that couldn’t make it past my Cynicism Checklist. Enterprise 2.0 passes the checklist. It’s taking a lot of different forms at the many companies that we work with, but it always includes an Enterprise RSS component. And it is generating a lot of well-deserved optimism!

Brian Kellner
Vice President of Project Management

RSS is Everywhere!

Well, that may be true on the Internet, but not as true within the enterprise. At NewsGator, we find prospects and customers at different stages in RSS adoption, and almost all ask the same question: "How do I get existing information into RSS?"

There are a number of mechanisms to accomplish this goal, and the answer will depend on your business problem. There are three major business processes and problems that I'll cover here: newsletters, corporate communications and legacy data.

Newsletters

Many of our customers come to us with an e-mail overload problem, and newsletters are part of that. In most cases, we suggest that customers use our E-mail Feed feature. E-mail Feeds are a very accessible way to create RSS from an e-mail. An author creates an e-mail feed, composes the newsletter in an e-mail and sends it to the e-mail feed address. Subscribers to that e-mail feed receive the e-mail within NewsGator Enterprise Server (or Inbox for Outlook, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Go! for Blackberry or Windows Mobile, or Desktop). Since an e-mail feed is just like any other feed in our system, an enterprising organization could also re-purpose that content to a portal or other external destination using our APIs.

Corporate Communications

As a corporate communicator, blogging is a really convenient way to put your content into RSS. Don't considering blogging as just a bunch of casual posts about your kids or political candidates. Think of it as a really effective alternative to all that staff e-mail. Even e-mails where you have five people on the cc line, you should consider blogging it! (I blogged this internally for feedback before it goes up on our public site for you to read.) Tags associated with a blog post allow you to target that information to the right constituents. Many of our customers are evaluating SharePoint as a blogging platform, since they are either evaluating or rolling out SharePoint as part of an Enterprise 2.0 solution. Plus, SharePoint's integration with the Word 2007, OneNote 2007 and Windows Live Writer makes blogging really accessible to everyone in your organization. Look to other blogging platforms like SixApart's Movable Type -- they may have additional desirable features.

Legacy Data

What about those systems that we won't be replacing in the next 12, 18, or even 48 months? What if I'm in a heterogeneous IT environment? How do you expose that data in RSS? We've partnered with /n software and provide RSSBus as an enabler for just this kind of scenario. RSSBus is a framework that resembles Yahoo Pipes that allows you not only to convert legacy data into RSS format but combine legacy systems output as a mashup that can be distributed through NewsGator Enterprise Server.

Ashley Roach
NGES Product Manager

Enterprise RSS Use Cases Proliferate

At NewsGator, we’ve been developing and marketing Enterprise RSS for more than two years. We have seen more than one hundred different examples of how companies are using or planning to use Enterprise RSS. While we literally see new ones on a daily basis, there are three broad categories that encompass many of the ways that organizations deploy Enterprise RSS solutions to help solve a problem that affects a large segment of the employee base, often as part of a larger technology initiative. These examples are not mutually exclusive, and many larger organizations undertake Enterprise RSS projects for two or even three of the purposes, often finding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Internal Communications

A primary challenge for many corporate communications, marketing and HR professionals is ensuring that the information they send out gets read and/or acted upon by stakeholders (departments, executive staff, project teams, entire company). The problem occurs in part because mass e-mails are often missed or ignored, and corporate portals are underutilized. RSS helps to solve this problem.

Information about a company, its products, competitors and industry can be delivered via RSS feeds, providing an alternative or complement to newsletters and mass e-mails. Individual users, specific groups or the entire organization can be subscribed to relevant RSS feeds from built-in readers in the enterprise portal, e-mail clients (in a folder outside of the inbox), Web browsers, mobile devices and desktop readers, including:

- Company announcements, department newsletters, meeting notes
- Internal research and development projects
- Clippings containing highly relevant information sorted by product, brand, market or competitor (Either standalone or as a replacement for newsletters)
- High-profile internal and external blogs and news feeds
- Benefit, policy and financial information from HR and Finance
- Notifications from CRM, ERP, HR, and SCM applications

A related but increasingly popular twist on this use case is leveraging Enterprise RSS to inform employees about critical information when they don’t have dedicated computers or e-mail access. A very large retail bank is deploying a system that notifies tellers about fraudulent checks in their area and IT outages by flashing alerts on their desktops via a taskbar-based mini-RSS reader. This use case is also applicable in manufacturing, retail and entertainment environments and is also helpful for mobile-based service and support workers.

Information Aggregation and Syndication

Information is a critical currency for getting business done, and the volume of it that exists, both internally and externally, is growing at a rapid rate. For sales, marketing, communications, services or R&D employees (among others), finding and consuming this information is extremely time-consuming and often fruitless.

At their core, RSS aggregators are designed to solve this problem by bringing everything together and eliminating the need to visit multiple web pages or sift through e-mail newsletters. Unlike individual-use aggregators, Enterprise RSS systems allow you to access external feeds from news sites, blogs and other content providers but also securely subscribe to feeds from internal sources, including blogs, wikis, portals, content management systems and enterprise applications. In addition, due to the broad set of reading options and administrative functionality, it is not a requirement for the users to be RSS experts. Systems such as NewsGator Enterprise Server allow managers and/or administrators to subscribe employees to relevant feeds, including:

- Data feeds from premium content providers such as Thomson or Factiva
- Meeting notes from wikis
- Project collaboration updates
- Internal research and development projects
- Clippings containing highly relevant information sorted by product, market or competitor
- Pertinent internal and external blogs and news feeds
- Notifications of new marketing documents or sales tools
- Audio and video podcasts containing training curricula
- Notifications from CRM, ERP, HR, and SCM applications

Looking at absolute numbers of deployments, this is probably the most popular use case as it affects a large segment of almost any organization. We’ve seen numerous deployments in legal, pharmaceutical, chemical, financial services, insurance and technology settings, among others.

Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

Larger organizations often struggle to ensure that employee collaboration occurs in a healthy, productive manner. How do they make sure people stay up-to-date without drowning in a sea of information? How do individuals make others aware of their particular expertise?

Enterprise 2.0 or Social Software tools such as wikis, podcasts, tagging, and social networking solutions are often used to address this challenge. With e-mail an increasingly ineffective method of notification, success of these tools requires an effective notification mechanism so users don’t have to continually check the different sites to see if something has been added or updated.

Enterprise RSS platforms can deliver these notifications to a variety of different places where users can easily access them, as outlined above. RSS feeds from blogs and wikis also become more easily discoverable and searchable. Organizations can embed one-click “chiclets” to let users automatically subscribe to feeds from:

- Executive or employee blogs
- Departmental or project wikis
- Social networking systems
- Podcasts

While many companies deploying internal blogs as part of an internal communications effort (an example of multiple use cases in action), or particular groups utilizing wikis, there are a number of organizations in the manufacturing sector (aerospace and defense and other discrete manufacturers) and federal government departments that are facing the prospect of seeing mass retirements among the most experienced parts of their workforces.

Some of the more forward-looking ones are trying to address the loss of the “tacit knowledge” that exists within the heads of these employees through the use of Web 2.0 tools. The implementation is usually a combination of blogs and wikis (for sharing the knowledge formally) and social networking systems (to let younger workers find other people with similar areas of expertise and elicit that information informally). RSS is then used as the mechanism for notifying users of updates from those tools.

We will focus more specifically on various functions or industries, but feel free to post comments if you have any specific questions in the interim.

Todd Berkowitz
Marketing Director