RSS going mainstream?

It seems that RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summaries, depending on your point of view - is starting to make it onto the corporate IT radar. eWeek, a well-respected enterprise IT publication from the Ziff-Davis stable has just published a slew of stories on the subject - a summary of the technology and potential benefits in RSS Makes Enterprise Headlines, a case-study in RSS Aids Relief Organization, and a cautionary view as Jim Rapoza says “Don’t Believe RSS Hype“. When there’s contrarian views under the same masthead as breathless hype, it’s a sign that the technology is on it’s way to maturity in our experience Separately they’re reviewing Moveable Type - a blog engine getting the same treatment as the latest corporate heavyweight application from Microsoft. Add to this the fact that management guru Tom Peters is using RSS to distribute his views, and it’s clear that there’s something going on.

The key to enterprise take-up of RSS in our view doesn’t necessarily lie in the strategic approaches that eWeek is featuring, however. Our experience is that the desktop - or rather the news aggregator - is the stalling factor in the widespread adoption. Several of our corporate customers have been wowed by the power of weblogs and wikis in capturing enterprise information and intelligence, but rather less ecstatic once they realised that there’s a client implication. Although it’s the best news aggregator implementation for the PC that we’ve come across, surprisingly it’s Newsgator that’s caused some of the sharpest intakes of breath - it seems that the somewhat cranky nature of Outlook that makes a wide deployment of a plug-in something that corporate IT functions are wary of. As one systems administrator commented, “We can’t keep up with patches for 30,000 desktops - never mind installing a paradigm shift”.

In the instances where employees have the ability (legitimately or otherwise) to control their own applications to an extent, the path of RSS introduction has been somewhat smoother - individuals can go ahead with an installation and become a maven for the technology once it transforms their working life. (And we don’t think that’s breathless hype.) There’s a lot of debate around about the rise of DIY-IT and how corporate IT policies might be holding back the adoption of beneficial technologies, so it will be interesting to see how quickly RSS finds its way into the mainstream. Perhaps we’re waiting for Microsoft to retro-fit newsreading capabilities into their out-of-the-box software - or perhaps this is an occasion when Redmond can’t move quick enough to ride the wave, and others can get there first?

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