There’s a consistent theme in our customers’ inquiries and interest in the RSS versus Email debate that involves both the content consumption and content creation side of the equation.

Our conversations with Enterprise 2.0 project team members from financial services, technology, education, and industry analysts share a common thread. They are all struggling with the cultural challenges of easing the transition between the the old world of email and attachments and the new world of persistence and subscription. They are all looking for publishing and delivery tools that allow their users to have it their way -- in their RSS reader or in their inbox.

1. Use Attensa for Outlook in its Outlook centric use mode. Feeds look like folders, posts look like email. Easy for any Outlook user to get up the learning curve fast. I know there are lots of sound technical reasons to suppress this use case (primarily PST file bloat) but it's the best way to spoon feed newbies RSS. From there they can evolve to the river-of-news, intelligent prioritization, tagging, reading feeds in Sametime, on their BlackBerry and anywhere that matches the content to their attention, location and personal workflow.
2. Use the server to push feeds to the inbox through Exchange for newbies and email lovers and use the server to push feeds to Attensa feed reading clients for the early adopters. Give users the flexibility to decide where they want to access the content. It's likely that an individual's preferences and access points will change as they grow more comfortable with feeds and feed reading. Push and lock down the content on the server for appropriate feeds but let users decide when are where to read them.
3. Publish a custom feed from an email client. In theory this makes the transition for creating and publishing new content easier. We've given people to the basic tool kit to get this done on the Attensa Feed Server. It’s another step in the integration of Read|Write world.

In the end, I think our customers are looking for a tool set that lets the content creator publish once and distribute anywhere and that lets content consumers access content anywhere, anytime in the tools that match their personal workflow.

We're getting there.