James Dallow at Chief Tech asks "Why aren't we getting enterprise RSS yet?" Maybe it's because no one in the industry has clearly articulated the real business value of a managed RSS ecosystem. So here's Attensa's crack at getting the message through.

Let's start with a blinding flash of the obvious. Information Moves. It moves markets, innovation, time to market, price, profits and productivity. Enterprise RSS moves information. Enterprise 2.0 tools enable people to easily work together to share ideas, develop solutions, improve work processes and solve problems. Building a collaborative network can have a profound impact on your teams’ abilities to anticipate market trends and accelerate implementation. Effective collaboration expands the size and scope of projects and the number of projects that can be handled simultaneously. Use it well and you can get products and services to market faster and outpace competitors. A managed feed environment is at the heart of an effective collaborative network. It is a critical tool that automatically and intelligently gets the right information to the right people at the right time and can free organizations to move faster than ever before.

Think of it this way. RSS, ATOM and XML put the flow in Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise RSS is at the foundation of the collaborative infrastructure. It provides secure, clutter free communication channels that enable knowledge workers, partners and customers to more effectively receive, act on and collaborate around high-value and high-priority information. By automatically, instantly and intelligently delivering the most up to date information to everyone involved, team members can identify and act on opportunities and threats faster and decrease response time from minutes to seconds.

A managed RSS ecosystem:

• Is the backbone of a collaborative publish subscribe infrastructure
• Receives and channels information from a variety of sources (open web content, subscription content, content management systems, business applications and messaging systems) to targeted users and groups
• Connects to internal and external content and data sources
• Provides information security
• Connects to existing communication tools (email, IM, web browser, portals, mobile devices)
• Provides secure, synchronized access anywhere on any device
• Works with your existing related infrastructure to provide a complete end-to-end communications platform.

Attensa's CEO, Charlie Davidson and CTO, Eric Hayes talking about RSS and attention in the enterprise. Thanks to our friends at Jive Software for hosting the PDX Web Innovators meet-up.

It's a question that inevitably comes up in every conversation we have with businesses looking to use RSS for streamlining communications. We think there are three big, compelling reasons to use a managed system for integrating RSS in your enterprise communications mix: synchronization, analytics and security.

Synchronization is the key to getting the content you want, where you want it. Attensa provides a synchronized reading experience on the desktop, in the browser, in IM and on the phone. Channeling the feeds you want, to the devices you want, without slogging through duplicates requires a sophisticated approach to synchronization that keeps feeds updated at every access point. Subscriptions are up to date. Articles read are marked read. Articles deleted are deleted. Everywhere. Subsets of feeds can be channeled to different access points and no matter where the content is consumed it will be up to date.

Analytics are essential to what one of our key customers aptly described as "Closed Loop Communications." Attensa's managed RSS ecosystem gives you the ability to see how content is being consumed and to determine the inherent value of specific communication streams. Providing metrics on how content is being consumed in your organization shines a bright light on the quality and relevance of internal communications. Publishers can can see how many people are actively reading their content versus the number of people subscribed. Attensa's AttentionStream reporting can be used to identify the most efficient channels for getting specific content to targeted users and groups. And, it can help identify (and hopefully reduce) occupational spam and be a driver for improving the quality of internal communications. This only works in a managed environment with synchronized AttentionStream technology. Attensa's AttentionStream works for users by intelligently prioritizing content and bringing the most important information to the forefront of the user's attention while it relays analytics to the server that can be used to create meaningful reports on content consumption.

When it comes to security fundamentals, Google Reader can't handle authenticated feeds. But more importantly, no enterprise should want their confidential data stored in the cloud outside of their control. With a managed RSS ecosystem, content and metrics are stored securely. Your data. Your hardware. Your policies. Your compliance. If the researchers, engineers, marketing and other key contributors in your organization are using Google Reader (which is a terrific reader for individuals) you need to think about the risk of Google's ability to connect your domain to the feeds and the details on the articles being read by your employees.