Not long ago most people didn’t think about RSS or Atom as much more than a way to keep up with blogs and Slashdot.

Finally, small businesses are seeing how cheap and easy it can be to use syndicated feeds in the enterprise to deliver nearly any kind of content imaginable behind and beyond the firewall.

So when should you use syndicated feeds to deliver information instead of, say, the traditional email distribution list? One simple guideline may just answer that question:

If the same content needs to go to more than one person without the need for response, deliver it with RSS or Atom.

This really isn’t different than the use-case for providing information on an internal company website. Why manage email lists, SMTP servers, subscription policies, etc. ad nauseum, when you can simply provide a URL?

For people to really grok this concept, though, RSS/Atom still needs to be demystified among the masses (read: your manager.)

I recently had the privilege of speaking to a group of IT professionals in Colorado Springs about how RSS and even podcasting could be used within their company and for their customers. It was cool to see the light-bulbs click on around the table as this concept began to sink in:

An RSS feed is just an XML document. You don’t need a webserver… even a fileserver will do.

However you produce the XML, drop it on a fileserver and hand out the file:// url to your coworkers. It may not be the “coolest” way to serve up RSS or Atom, but it gets the job done.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 09:05 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.