Ten Reasons Why 'Enterprise RSS' Has Failed To Become Mainstream

This article by Mike Gotta is a response to an article that appeared in ReadWriteWeb and which declared Enterprise RSS to be dead. He disagrees that feed readers are the main reason for this and says that “Enterprise RSS has not taken off yet – as opposed to actually having ‘died.’ ” He goes on to list what he thinks are 1o reasons for the slow take-up of Enterprise RSS.

Richard Hare later comments:

At some point you have to stop focusing on the technology and give people tools which fit with how they work.

At British American Tobacco, instead of an IT-style RSS launch which overpromises on functionality irrelevant to 80% of users, we quietly placed a feed on the intranet homepage and linked it to the Twitter-style updates in our Facebook-style social networking tool/internal directory. At no point did we mention “feeds”, “rss” or any other jargon which could potentially create barriers.

This confirms my own experiences of Enterprise implementation of not just RSS but also other Web 2.0 technologies. Those that have been particularly successful have not used terms such as wiki, blog, feeds nor have they required the user to switch applications to view the information. Instead, services are integrated seamlessly into the Intranet pages. Easy for the user but admittedly not always straightforward for the Intranet development team to implement.