Is RSS undervalued by the big portal vendors, or their customers?

A subject close to my heart, RSS, and Mike Gotta raises some important points about Microsoft (and the other big vendors) support for standards and enterprise feed management:

"SharePoint exposes a lot of information via RSS feeds but apparently has no support for Atom - in fact, Microsoft seems to be very unclear on its support for Atom and perhaps might prefer to play with RSS extensions that muddy the waters given RSS is essentially an architectural dead-end. SharePoint is not a feed syndication platform - it's just another application that exposes feeds. This gap forced Microsoft to partner with NewsGator (i.e., Social Sites), but even that integration does not eliminate the need for enterprise IT organizations to look at what Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator offer themselves as complete feed syndication platforms.

Surprisingly, IBM is also completely absent regarding a feed syndication platform. I find it amazing (in an underwhelming manner), that a company touting social computing (e.g., Lotus Connections) and "Info 2.0" has not articulated a strategic vision related to XML feeds outside a simplistic client implementation in Notes 8 and surfacing XML feeds in its related back-end products (e.g., Domino, QuickR, etc). For now - Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator remain the only credible options with perhaps Oracle as perhaps the only large vendor that could make a move here."

I agree, Mike - but is it also a failure in the enterprise IT camp itself for failing to recognise why this important piece of messaging and computing architecture is so important? i.e. if they don't ask for, they won't build it?

Technorati tags: Mike Gotta, RSS, Enterprise RSS, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Attensa, Newsgator, KnowNow