A piece by Neville Hobson
commenting on a post on RWW talking about the
Death of Enterprise RSS asks:
...the fact is that RSS has not captured corporate imaginations. What do you think will be the trigger, the tipping point if you like, that will make decision-makers within corporations sit up and take notice?
In fact, this probably marks the tipping point when it comes to life - when publications like RWW start to proclaim the "Death of X" it probably means its started to slide down from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" on the Hype Curve, down into the "Slough of Despond", and from that point on it becomes increasingly useful.
Actually, in the RWW comments section there are a number of helpful pointers to RSS's future in the Enterprise -
Eric Brown notes:
When it comes to RSS readers, we've got to look at the enterprise itself and ask the following questions:
Does IT want users installing yet another software product?
Probably not. Microsoft Outlook is fairly standard in most large organizations. When people have to subscribe to internal / Enterprise RSS, IT staff will normally chose an existing application (Outlook) to read RSS.
Do users see the value in the RSS feed?
Many people still don't understand RSS. I've yet to run across an organization that puts really valuable information on an RSS Feed. If there is no valuable information on the feed, why subsribe? Hence...the reason Enterprise RSS is dying/dead
.
And this post
from Nigel Hall
I think the more pertinent point is, where is the use of RSS as a technology within the enterprise.
Obviously, outbound marketers are starting to use it to syndicate messaging via blogs and corp web sites. However, I suspect inbound use is beginning to pick up. My evidence for this is purely anecdotal, as I haven't worked in the enterprise for quite a while, however, for the past couple of years I've had tangential connections to Microsoft SharePoint projects. These are only just starting to roll out in the enterprise - It takes big companies forever to change how they do things (the proverbial business processes), but once an idea takes hold, change can happen quite quickly.
I think Microsoft SharePoint could be the killer app for RSS in the enterprise. SharePoint has RSS built in and uses it to syndicate changes that happen within the SharePoint ecosphere and notify enterprise workers that something significant has happened. Of course, SharePoint RSS could work with third-party RSS readers, but it's really designed to be used with Microsoft's Office Suite, where enterprise workers can interface with SharePoint, through RSS and other means, directly.
And from another commentator called Jon:
Looking at Newsgator & Attensa, these are expensive enterprise tools and trying to sell them to IT managers that don't fully understand RSS is next to impossible. Imagine saying to a CIO, who barely understands what RSS is, that you need $175,000 for Enterprise RSS software... it isn't an easy sell.
As someone who is responsible for bringing these tools into a large enterprise, it's taken a year just to explain & sell blogs, wiki's, etc. We're starting with lots of Open Source tools, and then trying to sell a huge expensive tool from one of these vendors is not easy. We're in the process of rolling our own, not because we want to, because we just can't get the funding for one of these products.
You get the picture - overpriced products, low practical utility, doesn't fit into existing system stack and the existing "good enoughs" do the job as well as the early RSS systems. Enterprises change slowly and tend to use technology when it has some form of track record - the risks of implementing unproven stuff are usually too great unless the situation is dire or an emergency, or the business benefits are too great to ignore - none of which apply in RSS's case.
But I suspect, as the last commentator notes, that many companies have been quietly playing with RSS and finding what works, and the trigger that Neville is looking for is The Crunch - where RSS genuinely saves time and money it will be used. If it has no benefit over say extending email to adopt the key features, it will be exposed and rejected.
