Company Profile

NewsGator and RSS help Triple Point build a new information management solution

Using NewsGator and other tools, Triple Point Technology has transformed the way they share information within the enterprise. From critical build and release notifications, to internal publishing and collaboration, publishing via RSS has dramatically changed their information landscape. NewsGator provides seamless access to this information, all while preserving the familiar user experience of Microsoft Outlook^®.

Situation

Triple Point Technology is a leading provider of commodity trading solutions for energy, power, and financial services firms around the world. Combining leading technology with industry expertise, Triple Point is able to streamline operations for over 70 of the world's busiest commodity trading companies.

Triple Point has been recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America. This aggressive growth has led to new challenges in communication and information dissemination.

Triple Point's information has traditionally been stored in individual mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Server^® and Microsoft Outlook^®. But as the organization is growing, users are realizing that email is not necessarily the best communication mechanism for critical information which must be regularly updated, distributed, and archived. Corporate knowledge tied up in Outlook^® and Exchange is difficult to find, difficult to search, and generally not available to all users who need access to the information in a convenient way.

The general difficulty of creating and maintaining mailing lists has also been a problem. "For instance, new releases or nightly builds are often announced to the groups via email. That's a good basic business process for any software company," says Allie Rogers, Chief Information Officer of Triple Point. "However, when announcing to a static group via email, we run the risk of missing the new sales guy who really needs to get a demo of the latest feature to a new prospect."

Solution

Triple Point started with a simple goal: "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information "hunt and peck" that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says Allie. They wanted to leverage the fact that employees already spend significant time using Outlook, and also build upon intranet work they had already done with SharePoint.

The solution was multi-fold: weblogs were created for employees to publish to, business systems were modified to leverage RSS, intranet sites now notify via RSS, and NewsGator delivers the content to the desktops.

Weblogs

Internal weblogs were created using Six Apart's Movable Type. Internal authors are accustomed to sending email, but now post certain information to their new weblog instead; when they do, a permanent, searchable record exists of the information. "It's a delicate balance between email and weblogs," says Allie, "but we're getting better at it."

Multiple groups within Triple Point are now using weblogs. The development teams use them to post frequently asked questions, design documentation, daily test results, status reports, and other information. With a mixture of individual and project weblogs, the information tends to categorize itself, and others can easily subscribe to the portions they care about. The sales force is also using weblogs to keep abreast of prospects, processes, and general questions and answers, promoting quick and seamless communication across the entire team.

With these weblogs and NewsGator, Triple Point is changing the way they communicate internally. "People produce local, private content in email and send it to a select few. Often it may be the wrong select few. We're trying to change that," says Allie. "Publish globally, via weblogs, but still read locally, via Outlook and NewsGator."

Business Systems

Second, automated business systems are being retrofitted to generate data in RSS format. For example, Triple Point uses StarTeam for source control and release management. Using the StarTeam API and some XML savvy, they have built dynamic RSS feeds based on changes to the projects managed by StarTeam. In the past, developers were required to produce email announcements of each source code change; now that process has been automated via RSS.

The benefits to this go past the obvious, according to Allie. "The new sales guy can subscribe to the feed for the month that he cares about serving a new prospect, and ignore it at other times. Further, the producer of the announcement need not be concerned that the message is not getting out to the right set of people. The distribution lists are self-regulating."

Intranet

Third, intranet content is being enhanced with RSS. For example, content in SharePoint is being enhanced to generate RSS change notifications, and other systems have been so modified as well. Whenever existing notification systems were inadequate, clumsy, or manual, Triple Point has built RSS generation systems around them to enhance and automate the process.

Client

To tie it all together, NewsGator has been adopted as the company-wide standard client for RSS feeds. Since employees already use Outlook, "NewsGator was the natural choice," says Allie.

And since Outlook^® itself is a personal database system, using NewsGator allows RSS-driven content to be locally archived and persisted on an individual basis. At the same time this content is being stored locally by certain individuals, it's also being archived publicly and searchable for all users within the organization. "We now have the best of both worlds," Allie says.

NewsGator's short learning curve, convenience, and ease of use has been a boon for Triple Point. "We started enhancing our systems to work with RSS in September 2002, and used stand-alone news aggregators on the desktops," says Allie. "By February 2003 less than 5% of potential users were reading these feeds regularly." Triple Point switched to NewsGator in March 2003, and within two months saw adoption increase to about 35%. "The key for us is the tight integration with Outlook^® and the stand-alone tools never became popular with our users."

Using NewsGator, Triple Point integrates information from RSS feeds into Outlook, where it becomes just another information source alongside email. With more RSS information sources available every day, NewsGator has proven itself as a critical tool in Triple Point's day to day operations.

For More InformationFor more information about NewsGator, visit the NewsGator web site at http://www.newsgator.com.

For more information about Triple Point Technology, Inc., visit the Triple Point web site at http://www.tpt.com.

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