Indvidual Readers vs. Enterprise RSS solutions

As promised in the post on Friday, we're going to use this space to help spur a broader discussion of important issues. Later this week, we'll talk about interesting use cases for enterprise RSS and discuss some of the less obvious applications that are benefiting from the personalization, syndication and community tools from our Private Label Platform. In the coming weeks, we'll also take a wide-ranging look at the idea of relevancy. However, in this morning's post, we'll be addressing the question that comes up most frequently in discussions with customers and prospects, during Webinars and at trade shows- when does an enterprise solution (like NewsGator Enterprise Server) make more sense than using individual readers?

Putting some perspective around this for a moment before going into specifics, NewsGator offers a wide range of aggregators for consumers and small businesses including NewsGator Online, Inbox, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire. There are also dozens of free and low-cost readers from other companies. Individuals typically purchase (or sign-up for in the case of free readers) them, for either personal or business use, although often without corporate sponsorship (in the form of reimbursement). However, it's not uncommon for small offices to purchase five, ten or twenty of one of those products. Less frequently, the purchases number into the hundreds or even thousands for one organization.

Although passing around an OPML file from user to user is an option, implicit in these products is the idea that individual users will take responsibility for finding and subscribing to feeds on their own. Now when you get to a point where you have an organization (either company or department) where information typically flows from an individual or set of individuals out to a bigger set of recipients, then that model doesn't work as well. Think of librarians or knowledge managers or perhaps competitive intelligence and internal communications from the marketing department as examples. In these cases, the option is to use RSS as an alternative information delivery platform to getting information to portals or e-mail.

This is where something like NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) comes in. The group administration function (either organization wide or delegated down to a department) allows the administrator to automatically subscribe users to relevant feeds such as those from premium content providers (Thomson, LexisNexis) keyword/phrase alerts and searches or the executive staff. Assuming that you want to offer the ability for users to get feeds on their own, then the discovery capabilities also play a role. Customizing the taxonomy (the categories of feeds) is a way to make important content easily accessible via logical categories (business units, functions, geographies etc;). NGES' searchable central index and search filtering capabilities also help in this regard.

In addition, to administration and discovery, there are some other capabilities that you wouldn't get with an individual reader. Included in that list are the ability to take non-RSS content from e-mails (such as newsletters) and forwarded them to an address that creates an RSS feed. This is a feature we built at the request of librarians. Another feature is the ability to deliver to a wide range of interfaces and devices (intranet, portal, Microsoft Outlook, mobile etc;), let the users pick which ones they want to use, even at the level of specific feed and then synchronize the read states. A third feature important feature is reporting. If you have individual use readers, you get no view into what people are subscribing to or reading and where improvements can be made to ensure better uptake of important information. Finally, there is the bandwidth savings, an important concern to IT departments. Instead of every reader polling every publisher independently, NGES grabs a feed once and distributes new items to the individual subscribers.i

So how important is size of organization? From our perspective, something like NewsGator Enterprise Server makes sense at around 50 users or so. An organization or department with far fewer users, say 5-10, would likely benefit from NGES, but the fact they need IT's involvement to deploy and manage the system (a problem when there is no IT staff) makes it a little harder. However, when we come out with a hosted version later this year, which Greg Reinacker discussed a little while back, this eliminates the IT issue.

Everyone has different needs and different criteria for evaluating RSS solutions. The drivers for purchasing a particular product are different based on the buyer- librarian vs. IT vs. business department.If you have any questions on whether your particular organization would benefit from an enterprise solution, let us know.

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