Part 1 of the The RSS Diaries: Interviews about Syndication in the Enterprise.
March 12, 2005.

inkBlots: When did you first see the potential for RSS/Atom to be a business tool?

Bill French: 1999. I was doing some research at Starbase (now part of Borland) and I was looking closely at ICE (a Vignette-developed XML syndication format). It was then that I realized syndication had merit for even the simplest of business objectives.

iB: What do you find to be the biggest obstacle for your customers to use syndicated feeds within their own businesses?

BF: Most Web content systems are woefully incapable of semantic output (through transformation) so there’s a significant challenge to making existing content available in syndicated formats. Also, few content management systems provide API’s, and those that do are typically not well understood by the system administrators.

iB: Technology has changed quite a bit since you created QuickSite in 1994, yet many of the classic problems in content management prevail. What is the role of syndicated feeds in solving these problems?

BF: Indeed, content management problems still exist partly because enterprises took a little detour in 1998 — believing that monolithic content management solutions provided a cure for all their pains. One of the greatest pains (at the time) was providing solutions that embraced workflows in the publishing and management process. Far too much energy was spent to create rigid workflows that matched command and control processes, but in reality, a narrow set of those use cases actually required such control.

“The emergence of syndication doesn’t change the reality that businesses need to control their content.”The emergence of syndication doesn’t change the reality that businesses need to control their content. However, it has placed additional pressure on businesses to adopt content strategies that increase information update and communication velocity. Customers are demanding better awareness models (e.g., new content should find customers instead of customers finding new content) and syndication services provide that. But to achieve a unified strategy for syndication that satisfies specific customer requirements, the enterprise must rethink their content management infrastructure. Indirectly this will cause them to ponder the use of corporate blogs in certain parts of the content sphere, and RSS feeds that stem from legacy content sources including their own web sites. Completely new syndication feeds will emanate from corporate information sources that were once considered private to the enterprise. Feeds of this nature will likely be secure and permissions based.

iB: New technology brings new challenges. What are the pitfalls or sticking points for businesses who start to use RSS/Atom in the enterprise?

BF: Oddly enough, understanding your customer’s content requirements is tougher than the technical challenges associated with syndication. It’s relatively easy to create feeds. It’s very difficult to create a feed that a segment of your audience cannot live without - and that’s the objective. This challenge is at the heart of *all* content challenges, but with syndication it’s particularly more important because RSS is truly an “opt-in” medium. If a feed is not useful, the subscriber will leave.

iB: What problem does MySmartChannels solve for your typical customer?

BF: To be clear, MySmartChannels™ is an application designed to help people get a grasp of the possibilities of the MyST platform. Our public experience sandbox is there for people to freely use and play with to experience channels, RSS, Atom, and even content syndication through Microsoft Office applications. In this regard, MySmartChannels™ is purely an educational tool.

MySmartChannels is also a platform for building specific applications that solve certain problems. Blogsite™ is a good example. Enterprise RSS services is another. MySmartChannels™ provides a unified foundation for managing and syndicating content (both publicly and privately). With the MySmartChannels™ foundation in place, we add MyST-X, an automation scripting component that allows us to automate the gathering and transformation of many types of content from many sources. MySmartChannels™ provides a multitude of syndication formats; Atom, all flavors of RSS, SDF-BusinessNews, OPML, and Microsoft Office Smart Tags and Microsoft Office Research Services. It also provides a framework for extending syndications to more proprietary formats like 3M’s Post-It Software Notes.

iB: What are some of the common ways your customers are using RSS or Atom to improve their bottom line? Are there any novel uses worth mentioning?

BF: Visibility and attention seem to be the most common drivers of RSS adoption. Information consumers are beginning to realize that Web surfing is an inefficient way to stay abreast of changes in content. The days when you go and click on a number of favorites to visit sites to see what’s new, are quickly evaporating. We are awash in information possibilities and the ones that create consumption efficiencies will be chosen over the ones that do not. Information consumers will eventually insist that content find them, instead of the other way around. RSS provides this reverse-model at very low cost. In this regard, adoption of syndication models will eventually be a requirement just to play the game; some business analysts believe we are already at this juncture.

iB: How do you see the use of syndication in the enterprise over the next year or two?

BF: Mostly what you see the early adopters doing - RSS for press releases, news, events, and product announcements. Obviously support in corporate blogsites will continue. RSS will invade every content niche where awareness and velocity are key publishing and consumption requirements. Eventually, secure use of RSS will play a supporting role as a knowledge management solution in businesses.

iB: Do you have any advice to the business person out there who wants to bring syndication into their own company?

BF: Yes. Start now, but start small. Find two areas where content needs to move more quickly and instant awareness provides distinct business benefits to you (the publisher) or the consumer. Your press releases and press room is a good target because journalists and analysts have begun to use RSS as a means of staying abreast of announcements. Another area - create an internally used feed for your marketing organization to watch what your competitors are up to. Use Technorati or PubSub to create a watch-list feed. Alternatively, use Yahoo News for this purpose - but the objective should be to first get some thinkers in your company using RSS readers - then broaden the possibilities.

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