Week 2: RSS: Day 3

Great.  There are a lot of sites that we could use RSS on, but what about at work?  How can we use this where it will make a huge impact?

Photo by Robert Scoble on Flickr

This is a story I tell often when I talk about these technologies.  In a past life one of my responsibilities was to put together a conference for our customers.  The first year I did this I introduced the use of some of the tools we are talking about in this Challenge, including RSS.   The majority of the work was done in these tools.

For this conference, a number of employees were tasked to create 1.25 hour sessions.  The content and tasks were tracked in this tool.  Instead of holding a meeting and getting an update as to everyone’s progress, RSS fed it to me.  If they were making progress, I saw it.  If there wasn’t any progress, I could see that updates were not made.  Then I could target that person directly, instead of pulling everyone into meetings or teleconferences and punishing those who were on track.

As software matures, it is not uncommon for them to include RSS feeds.  For example, SharePoint, a very common business tool by Microsoft,  has RSS feeds.  No longer do you have to check to see if a document or a space has been updated – it will tell you!

Yet, be warned.  Google Reader and other online services will not work with most business applications.  The reason? Your feed is behind a firewall – in other words, it is for your company only and can only be accessed with a user name and password.  Online RSS readers can’t cross that boundary.

To make this work, you will need to install an RSS reader on to your desktop.  Because it works on your computer, it is able to take user names and passwords and pull the feeds to you.

That doesn’t mean that you have to maintain two different RSS readers, however.  FeedDemon, a leading desktop RSS program (Windows only) will synchronize with your Google Reader feeds – so they stay the same.

RSS is, overall, pretty simple.

TO DO – Pay attention (Difficulty Level: EASY – Time: 0- minutes)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pimkie_fotos/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Image by Chesi - Fotos CC under Creative Commons

That’s right, just pay attention next time you are on a site or in an organization’s intranet.  Check to see if they have an RSS feed.  Learn where feeds typically are (web-based information) and where they are not (application-based information).  Sign up as the fancy hits you.