Sunday 20 April 2008

From Bill French at MyST: Three enterprise RSS use cases

I'm trying all social media channels to raise awareness and encourage support for the Enterprise RSS Day of Action. Via LinkedIn Answers I've exchanged a few messages with Bill French at MyST (who were already listed on the wiki's list of vendors) - in response to some input from Jack Vinson, he made a great point about the many directions that business RSS feeds need to be shared:

"Jack makes a good point - the term "enterprise" is used in overloaded contexts frequently. RSS (itself) is also [frequently] used casually and without specific business requirements in mind.

I like to classify RSS use cases - three that are helpful include customer-facing, employee-facing (which are ideally secure), and partner-facing (which may or may not require a security context). There are others of course, but this is a good high-level starting point."

He also adds some others comments that certainly mirror some of the other conversations I've been having about Enterprise RSS in the last few weeks:

"The issue of feed source is also important - generating feeds for improved employee productivity and awareness is a relatively new and emerging science. For this use case, security and automation are two of the bigger challenges that raise some devils in the details. Is it enough to secure a feed, or does the use case require a security context for each item in the feed? (e.g., are there subscribers that see a subset of the items?)

Most enterprise applications (which contain the bulk of the content that employees might appreciate in RSS form) are unable to produce RSS easily, and even those that can seem to create a feed have not fully entertained the security issues. After all - most enterprise applications *do* have stringent security contexts for each user."

I also found this old post on the MyST site from late 2005 that made me chuckle (in a good way!), titled, Techno-terms have a habit of sticking -- Blog and RSS are simply the latest.

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