RSS and the Enterprise

RSS is great, and enterprises are willing to pay real money for real solutions. Put them together and you get RSS for the Enterprise. Here are some resources that happened to cross my inbox today:

• Moreover is offering a free whitepaper, RSS and the Enterprise. Registration is required.
• eWeek says that RSS Sets Its Sights on the Enterprise.
• KnowNow offers RSS for The Enterprise: A Primer.

Getting the right info to the right people (and keeping it out of the hands of the wrong people) on a timely basis is a real challenge for an organization of any size.

In addition to the folks who need to stay informed on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis, a good enterprise information distribution system should allow newcomers to easily delve into historic information, and it should allow more casual observers and overseers to take a quick peek at what’s going on. Also, many organizations have permeable boundaries. In the old days, there were insiders (the folks who worked there) and the outsiders. These days, there are often partners, contractors, outsourced laborers, advisers, and so forth, all with some level of elevated privilege.

A nice set of RSS feeds can definitely play a part in keeping all of these parties in the loop. Getting this all set up is still not trivial, but I know that some really good people are working on this.

Like any really great technology, it often turns out that the highest and best use isn’t the one that it was originally designed for. I could definitely see this happening with RSS.