I sat down with Robert Scoble at PodTech a couple of weeks ago to bring him up to date on all things related to enterprise RSS, reading feeds in Outlook 2007 and Attensa. Here's the interview.

And, here's a demo of the Feed Server, Attensa for Outlook and the beta of Attensa for Outlook working in Outlook 2007.

We're launching a new version of the Attensa Feed Server today and the credit belongs to our customers - the IT pros, team leaders and users who have helped us define the new capabilities and feature set by giving us terriffic feedback and insight into the tools needed to manage and streamline the delivery of the right information, to the right people at the right time.

There is nothing like having real customers to turbocharge development. The incredibly valuable input comes from IT professionals and users in some of the world’s largest corporations including the leading companies in global logistics services, energy, financial services, investment banking , insurance, pharmaceuticals and health care.  Thank you.

Here are the highlights in the new version:

Have it your way: appliance, software appliance or hosted service

The Attensa Feed Server 1.1 is available as a Linux software appliance combining the Feed Server 1.1 application with an open source LAMP stack that readily installs on industry standard servers. The Attensa Feed Server will also be offered as a hosted service to meet the needs of small and medium businesses and workgroups and project teams in larger organizations.

Tiered adminstrator permissions to push the power to people who need it.

With tiered administration, IT administrators can create an unlimited number of administrators with permissions ranging from read-only access to full system control. Distributing administration responsibilities makes it easy to empower department managers, and team leaders to subscribe, channel and monitor Web feeds for their specific needs.

Advanced security

Thanks to Mike Gotta at the Burton Group for pushing on this. Administrators now have the ability to set strip out potentially malicious attachments and to set up lists of blocked feeds and enclosures. Administrators also have the ability to disable scripting from within feeds for additional security.

Enhanced attention reporting with searchable reports

Managers, team leaders and admins can access new reports based on Attensa’s unique AttentionStream analytics. Detailed Attention reports are searchable based on feeds, groups and users. Attention reporting helps gain insight into how users effectively convert information into wisdom as users gather information in their quest to answer questions and solve problems. Reports can be used to identify must read feeds and the most effective communications channels for getting information to specific users and groups.

Server Side Persistent Search

Admins and users with the appropriate permissions can search across 18 search engines and have relevant information delivered automatically as soon as it's available. The ability to add search from premium content providers is also available.

There's more you can read the Attensa Feed Server 1.1 announcement news release here.

If you want a quick web demo click here

Configuring Attensa 2.1 to publish using Windows Live Writer is easy, so you can republish to your blog with one click. While still in beta, Live Writer is a flexible and powerful tool for publishing and, so far, has performed well in my tests.

P.S. My boss made me write this, and I also wrote a short and sweet How To on using Attensa with Windows Live Writer to publish to your blog.

Attensa 2.1 makes a leap forward in giving control to the desktop user over whether potentially harmful scripts embedded in feed articles can execute.

Although feed subscriptions are less of a risk because, unlike the spam that fills our email boxes every day, we’ve actually asked, or in the case of pushed Enterprise feeds, a department decision-maker has asked on our behalf for the feed articles. But most of us want to know if scripts are running in the articles we’re viewing, and many of us would turn them off, given the choice.

Attensa’s new content filtering feature allows the user to control when and where they see content generated by scripting, iFrames, CSS, and other executable code publishers might include in the body of an article.

P.S. My boss made me write this. I also put up a How To on Article Content Filtering on our support site.