Another step on the path of progress for RSS and Atom in the business world: Microsoft has added RSS feeds to its Knowledge Base system.

For power users or software developers that use Microsoft technologies, this is a great way to keep abreast of the latest technical bulletins on a given product or topic. This kind of content has a much broader business value than the typical PR articles churned out in corporate feeds.

For those who don’t much care for/about Microsoft stuff, this is still a big win for evangelists of RSS in the enterprise. When the 800-pound Gorilla says RSS is a good mechanism for serving business data to customers, even the monkeys gain a little credibility.

The bad news is that the other big software primates have technology-related feeds, but have yet to open up their knowledge bases via syndication.

What I have seen is still primarily e-zine articles and tutorials. IBM’s developerWorks RSS feeds come to mind, and does Sun’s Developer Networks feeds and Oracle’s Technology RSS Newsfeeds. But where are the feeds for technical bulletins and patch releases? Software developers need to keep up on current knowledge, not just opinions.

Lets hope that Microsoft’s move will motivate the other guys to do more than just serve headlines. If you are a developer, you should demand it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 12:33 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.