I'll be showing how Attensa collaborates using Jive Software's Clearspace for cross functional projects. The presentation will be 4:48 (that's specific) on Thursday, September 6 at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I've posted the Attensa presentation on SlideShare

I left Portland late Sunday night, or was it Monday morning? Anyway it was way dark thirty. I arrived in Boston at 11:00 am. I headed over to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and sat down with CMP's Alex Dunne for this podcast interview. Excuse me if I sound rummy.

I'm in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference today. Got in Monday after taking the redeye from Portland. I sat down yesterday with Alex Dunn who is blogging and podcasting the conference for CMP. I'll post a link when the podcast is up.

Today is focused on connecting with the people who are driving the promise of connection, collaboration and change through Enterprise 2.0 technologies and tools.

It's the 40th anniversary of another big catalyst of connection, collaboration and change...the Summer of Love. In that spirit we are trying a new approach. We are quietly kicking off the Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Janet Johnson is blogging about it here.

The concept is to start a discussion and create the connections and integration points that will make Enterprise 2.0 technologies and products work together for real people. So customers can pick and choose, mix and match the best of breed products they need to solve their specific communication challenges.

Beneath the promise of Enterprise 2.0 apps things are missing.

Some of the obvious missing pieces are:

• The ability to securely and seamlessly move attachments from publishing platforms through feeds to desktop, web and mobile feed readers
• Consistent tagging across collaborative publishing and feed serving and reading platforms to make folksonomies and searching viable across tools
• Dealing with identity and security across apps - to many passwords...so little time.
• The ability to easily create custom feeds from blog and wiki apps that get the right information to the right people with no information overload or underload.

We've already started the conversation with Foldera and Jive and this is just the beginning. The are nearly 50 companies exhibiting at the conference.

Attensa will be exhibiting at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston June 18 - 21 in Boston. Here's CMP's official description of the conference.

"Enterprise 2.0 Conference provides thought leadership and instruction for forward-thinking IT and business professionals on the new Web 2.0 tools for the enterprise, the infrastructure required to support them and the cultural changes that must accompany them."

I think it might be closer to the Enterprise 2.0 version of Lucha Libre:

Monday features Harvard's Doctor Cerebro Andrew McAffee  versus Tigre Metalico Tom Davenport as they go mano a mano on the relevancy of Enterprise 2.0.

With nearly 50 exhibitors wrestling for attention the conference is destined to be the free fight.

The photos are from Malcomb Venville's amazing book Lucha Loco a striking collection of portraits and interviews of the real luchadores. Get this book. Your other coffee table books will tremble.

 Oh.... and get your tickets to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here. You can get a free pass for the exhibits and a $200 discount on the conference when you use the priority code: MLQUEB48 to register. Tell them Attensa sent you.

Ephraim Schwartz has written a great overview of Attensa in InfoWorld based on interview with our co-founder and CTO, Eric Hayes . InfoWorld is featuring an enterprise startup a day in the month of May and we are delighted to be selected.

Here's the take away.

"Attensa's software works by pushing RSS or managed Web feeds to specific users and groups behind the firewall, allowing knowledge workers in the enterprise to cherry-pick just the info they want. On the back end, the Linux-based Attensa Feed Server gathers feeds in the background, and gives IT administrators control of where those feeds go. Meanwhile, on the client side, Attensa has software for Windows, Mac, and BlackBerry, plus plug-ins for Outlook, Lotus SameTime IM, and others. Conveniently, the server takes care of syncing, so that if a user reads something on a BlackBerry, that same item is marked as having been read in Outlook as well.

Behind this basic infrastructure is AttentionStream, the real substance of Attensa's IP. AttentionStream prioritizes content based on a user's behavior, pushing that information to the top of the reader. "AttentionStream has the ability to intelligently and automatically pull information that is important to the user when they want it and push away information that isn’t important when they don’t want it," Hayes says."

This occasionally crops up in our discussions with companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In some corporations BLOG is four letter word conjuring up images of sociopathic rantings, and way too much time being devoted to cat pictures and reviews of LOST.

If you ask me, this paranoia boils down to fear of the unknown or maybe it's about lack or respect and lack of trust in employees to do the right things with the tools they have to work with. When you think about it, if you were inclined, you could do more damage to a company's reputation and morale with email and confidential attachments sent to the wrong people than you can with a secure internal blog post.

I'm not sure what drives this perception about blogs and I'm not the only one who has experienced this fear from corporate management. Six Apart's Anil Dash makes getting beyond fear of blogs a key message in his evangelism. The Burton Group's Mike Gotta has seen it and heard it too.  His take away is that companies need examples of how blogs can be used effectively to solve business and communication challenges.

I'm republishing the highlights from his post "Getting Over Fear of Blogs and including the list of blogging applications that make sense for business environments.

You can read Mike's complete post on Collaborative Thinking.

Mike takes it from here:

Regarding Web 2.0 and social software, I find that people are often captivated by the use of these concepts and tools in the consumer market. While some technologists are skeptical, there are also a growing number of people that are wondering how such practices and technologies could be applied internally and whether such use could bring about some degree of business transformation – especially in terms of leveraging worker know-how and collective insight.

The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up. There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:

• Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
• Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”

Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”

The conversation often swings back to the Internet and how blogs are used as a public soapbox to express personal opinions and how bloggers add fuel to emotionally-charged debates on topics many organizations view as a workplace distraction (e.g., politics, sports, entertainment, religion, breaking news, etc.). A good number of people I’ve talked to feel that blogs introduce risk (e.g., hostile workplace), negatively impacts productivity and hinders overall performance of business processes.

I think part of the problem is due to a lack of examples of how blogs can be applied to solve the types of business challenges organizations face on a daily basis.

Internal Communication

There are many situations where organizations need to broadcast information to its workforce without the need for that information to be pushed to its workers in an intrusive manner (e.g., e-mail).

• A Human Resources department can leverage blog technology to continually keep employees updates on various benefit plans, awareness of enrollment dates, etc.
• CXO-level management can leverage blogs to informally communicate company issues related to markets, economics and its competition.
• Organizations can use blogs to communicate information to employees on the various community-outreach and social programs in need of volunteers.

Program / Project Management

Program management offices (PMO) and project management teams often establish operating environments where information may not always be captured and disseminated in a timely manner. The structure of these organizing bodies may challenge its ability to quickly respond, making it difficult to communicate credible and relevant information.

• A PMO blog could provide a journal of activities, issues and future actions that could be valuable not only to workers within the PMO but to those monitoring and tracking the PMO elsewhere in the organization
• A group blog for developers and quality assurance teams could act as a clearinghouse to voice design concerns, for developers to record and report findings or to capture/disseminate software build and fix notifications discovered during development or testing cycles (e.g., shift notes)
• PMO and project teams create a variety of guidelines, procedures and other types of documentation. While wikis are good vehicles for the collaborative work on the content itself, blogs can provide a platform for individuals to provide deeper personal commentary.

Community-building

Organizations have struggled to find common off-the-shelf tools that allow for the capture, dissemination and augmentation of information while also enabling broad participation and community interaction. Facilitating open communication is a key aspect for organizations interested in sharing know-how and creating effective community-building environments (e.g., knowledge management).

• Research organizations have long valued the importance of personal journals and lab notebooks to catalog observations and record insight. Blogs within such an environment not only are of benefit to those within such communities but enable others to “look over the shoulders” of those engaged in such activities.
• Government organizations can use blog systems to enable first responders to share insight and lessons-learned from on-the-job experiences
• Specialists in many different professions (e.g., utilization management nurses, fraud investigators, security experts, underwriters, engineers) can use blogs to more easily communicate methods and practices relevant to their work activities

Business process

A multitude of business activities include capture of unstructured information as part of processing a particular task. Many applications do not naturally handle the type of free-form commentary and annotation users would like to add to a transaction or append to a case file. There are other situations where applications need to deal with conversational information that are not well-supported by traditional application models (e.g., issue tracking, exception handling, problem resolution).

• A competitive intelligence process is often dependent on capturing field observations, rumors and collating information detected from various news sources. Blog systems can provide the platform the collecting and vetting this type of market monitoring, analysis, and opportunity/threat assessment.
• Certain support processes require workers to capture notes as part of their remote activity (e.g., field repair). Offline authoring tools (e.g., Microsoft Windows Live Writer) could be used to compose analysis on a worker’s laptop and then upload to a group blog when network connectivity is available. In other situations, certain work activities might include capture of notes into operational logs. Blog technology can enable capture of task-related notes inline with performance of that operational process.

OK, I'm back.

We use the same tools and techniques internally.

• Our CEO as a blog to share the big picture with Attensa employees
• Our marketing and development teams use secure blogs to keep each group informed on project status, customer wins and the buzz surrounding Attensa
• Our sales and marketing people share competitive insights on a secure blog.
• We've set up a secure blog with our PR and SEO teams to share strategies, metrics and status reports.

Analytics on the Attensa Feed Server gives insight into how this information flows through the organization and helps assess and identify the most effective channels for communicating specific information

Attensa tools make publishing to these internal blogs incredibly easy. I used one of the republishing tools in Attensa for Outlook to share Mike's post this morning. I scanned the headlines from his blog in the River of News. The title "Getting Over Fear of blogs" caught my eye. I hit the Attensa publish icon which launched Windows Live Writer and pre-populates a new  blog post with the all of the copy, links and images - all nicely formatted. I just select the blog I want to publish to from a list. I can easily edit and add context, categories, tags and then republish the post with a click. These tools make it incredibly easy to share these thoughts with everyone subscribing to the blog. 

For a technology with Simple for a middle name, users are baffled by how to create custom feeds and content. The new version of the Attensa Feed Server provides a very simple answer. Use your email client. Users can create and deliver custom feeds and articles as easily as writing and sending an email. Your feed can be shared on the server and team members with permission can contribute to feed using email. It's a great publishing/subscribe mash-up tool. Here's how it works: (but to really see it in action, request a Feed Server demo).

 This is from Mike Gotta at Collaborative Thinking on Zimbra adding a Feed Reader

"The good news: many vendors are adding feed reader capabilities to their client platforms.

The bad news: many vendors are adding feed reader capabilities to their client platforms.

If you are an enterprise organization and looking at feed readers across varies collaboration, portal and content systems - remember - there are a lot of architectural and infrastructure issues to consider in terms of security, network management, feed management, etc. There are also some really important user needs as well - including synchronization of feeds across multiple client user experiences, including read/unread marks, etc. If you are committed to a Windows client, then look to see if the vendor is integrating with the Windows RSS Platform. If you are using a more complete end-to-end XML Syndication systems, then make sure that the vendor providing the client reader is able to integrate with those vendors as well.

What you really want to avoid is a potpourri of clients all handing RSS/Atom feeds differently (each well in its own right but chaotic when viewed as a collection of feed services)."

At Attensa we believe the platform is the product and that integrated readers built using a consistent architecture are essential to a well managed end-to-end XML syndication system. The Attensa Managed RSS Environment delivers clean, consistent synchronization, control over directing specific feeds to users and groups, multiple readers providing pervasive access to feeds, intelligent prioritization, scalability and reporting an analytics.

As our line of readers grows we are now offering multiple ramps to provide pervasive access to Enterprise RSS feeds. Our reader line-up includes a full featured Windows desktop reader and Outlook reader(download them here - they're free), a reader for Sametime Instant Messaging for alerts and time sensitive collaborative feeds and a Web reader integrated with the Attensa Feed Server. They all use the same architecture to facilitate "knowledge flow."

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.

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.

The Real Time Matrix's Jon Sofield and I spoke with Dennis Howlett about how precision persistent search can be used in the enterprise to filter signal from noise. Apparently we struck a chord based on his post on his blog AccMan: Solving the broken search problem.

I pulled this over from his blog AccMan

"How often have you searched on a term. only to find that 50-50% of what Google serves up is totally irrelevant? I reckon about 10% of my site traffic turns up by accident, largely because of a Google search...

I spoke with Scott Niesen, director of marketing at Attensa and Jon Sofield of Real Time Matrix the other evening to figure out what this means and how it works. Real Time Matrix, which, according to its blog is tapping into more than a million items per day, delivers only the news you want. This, from RTM’s site:

Conceptually, it’s pretty simple: take millions of live content feeds and correlate millions of preferences for content against them in real time. When an “item” matches within an acceptable coefficient, deliver it to any Internet-connected device.

In practice it isn’t though RTM has solved the riddle. Attensa turns this fine grained information into an enterprise RSS feed allowing the user to effectively mash up the most appropriate information required for the task in hand from any source."

In our conversation Dennis reeled of vertical after vertical where real time information is business critical. His list includes: brokerage house trading floors, pharmaceuticals, telcos, utilities and any business that want meaningful competitive and market intelligence. These businesses would all benefit from precisely honed searches that deliver "fine grained information" while eliminating irrelevant "cruff" ( in Dennis' parlance.)

We met Jeff Whitehead and Jon Sofield of the Real Time Matrix at the Office 2.0 conference in October. We quickly hit it off and it became clear to all of us that the work they are doing with precision search technology using real-time matching and filtering and our attention driven prioritization are a perfect fit for helping enterprise users cut through information overload.

Today, Jon and Jeff are launching iJ.am, a new breed of search engine (they descibe more accurately as a "matching engine and content router" that precisely matches and delivers personally relevant content from the web the instant it is published.

And today we are announcing our partnership with the Real Time Matrix. We're coupling our persistent search capability from within Outlook and on our Feed Server with RTM's sophisticated aggregation, matching and filtering technology to bring an indispensable research tool to our Enterprise customers. With the combined power of these search techniques business users can create precisely focused search channels that automatically and continuously deliver exactly the content they are searching for without duplication.

Jeff Whitehead says it best. "This technology cuts through information overload and puts control into the individuals' hands. Users simply set up and refine their search criteria and we deliver accurate, relevant and timely results with extreme prejudice."

With Attensa and Real Time Matrix researchers can search the past and filter the future by tuning their search criteria, in real time to deliver exactly the information they want without duplication, as soon as it is observed on the Internet.

Here are the specifics and next steps for our partnership.

First, we'll be adding the iJ.am search engine to the persistent search feature in Attensa for Outlook.

We will be adding persistent search and Real Time Matrix filtering to the Attensa Feed Server. With the new distributed admin feature, the power to create precision search feeds can be accessed by project teams throughout the enterprise.

Together with Real Time Matrix we will be offering custom integration for Enterprise accounts to tie Web and blog search with premium content and internal information search.

Here's the Attensa and Real Time Matrix partnership news release.

"We've been waiting for this for awhile. InfoWorld just published Mike Heck's thorough review of RSS Servers. Mike tested "three hot products in this burgeoning area: Attensa Feed Server, NewsGator Enterprise Server, and KnowNow 3 Enterprise Syndication Solution."

Here's Mike's bottom line on the category:"Tough Choice"

"I can't knock any of these solutions. (On a scale of 1 to 10 - 0.4 rating points separate the three players - I added this) Their designers understand that enterprise RSS is poised to become the focal point employees turn to for information, eclipsing individual aggregators plus systems such as portals, intranets, and enterprise applications."

Here's his bottom line on Attensa:

"Attensa gives you multiple deployment options, from configuring Outlook users with or without a desktop client to a Web interface and mobile options. The Outlook plug-in is laudable for features and usability. And intelligent ranking of feeds is noteworthy.

Mike had great things to say about the Attensa Feed Server, Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa approach to managing feeds behind the firewall.  He also shared some of the insights he has gained researching the category and talking to enterprise customers.

"63% of RSS users subscribe to work-related feeds."

"That latter finding shouldn't surprise IT managers. After all, RSS readers are easy to install and use. This technology does a fine job helping workers cut through irrelevant information that floods portals, enterprise search results, and e-mail. But as RSS's popularity rises, so do risks. For example, precious network bandwidth is consumed when many employees update the same feed. Plus, there are security risks associated with accessing inappropriate feeds. To get around these issues and give more employees the benefit of RSS, organizations are adopting enterprise RSS solutions."

"Enterprises using these solutions report measurable time savings -- often achieving full ROI in a few months."

"Enterprise RSS is poised to become the focal point employees turn to for information, eclipsing individual aggregators plus systems such as portals, intranets, and enterprise applications."

Now on to Mike's experience with Attensa:

"Attensa's RSS solution includes an Outlook reader that works stand-alone or can pull feeds located on a central Attensa Feed Server sitting behind your firewall. Optionally, enterprises can install Attensa's Exchange service to bypass the Outlook plug-in and deliver feeds directly to Exchange mailboxes. An AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web Reader and mobile clients -- Blackberry, Good Mobile Messaging for Exchange, and Windows Mobile 5 -- complete the picture

"I simply checked off options on forms to subscribe groups to individual feeds or multiple categories. Similarly, I set defaults for each group, such as whether feeds would be delivered to Outlook and which publishing features were enabled.

There's suitable reporting, including which users are reading what feeds, the number of feeds in the system, and related statistics.

For end-users, my testing indicated that Attensa for Outlook has minimal memory impact on Outlook. Feed Server works in the background gathering and processing RSS feeds, which were quickly pulled into Outlook using the standard MAPI protocol. As a result, when I signed into Outlook, the latest feeds were immediately available. Moreover, after I subscribed to a new feed, that information was sent to the appliance so the feed was kept current for everyone else who also had it on their personal subscription list.

"Attensa's Outlook plug-in provided the best user experience of the products reviewed. Its clean interface -- with resizable panes and multiple views -- was further adjustable to my working style. For example, subscriptions could be displayed as one large news feed or by categories. In both cases the text layout was easy to read. Additionally, organizations can apply custom style sheets to match corporate branding."

"You get several ways to arrange feeds in the order of importance: Predictive Ranking (feeds that would likely interest you based on the streams you read most frequently and consistently), personal favorites, or by date. I observed that Attensa's analytics techniques did indeed improve feed relevance the more I used the system."

"Of special interest, Attensa integrates with Salesforce.com. In this case, SFA changes are pushed directly to your mobile device via RSS -- eliminating the step of going to Salesforce.com to get updates on clients or prospects."

"What's more, Attensa's AttentionStream synchronizes desktop, mobile, and Web RSS readers -- meaning articles read, filed, and deleted are consistent across all platforms."

If you want to see for yourself how the Attensa can fit with your Enterprise RSS plans, we can easily set up a web demo.

The Burton Group's Mike Gotta provides a sound perspective on why a managed RSS solution makes sense for organizations compared to the unstructured use of online syndication and tagging services.

It boils down to this - efficiency, security, risk, confidentiality and insight.

Mike says it all here:

"While there are clearly a lot of benefits to social software tools and new technologies such as XML syndication (RSS), due diligence is required from the perspective of security, risk, audit competitive intelligence and overall confidentiality.  Some level of purposeful transparency is often perfectly acceptable and is actually a good practice in many situations. But being ignorant to how transparent you are as an enterprise can have consequences (e.g., a public relations nightmare, or serious breach of security) and that can be true if you are not paying attention to these emerging technologies and use of consumer services within your organization."

The Attensa Feed Server connected with Attensa for Outlook creates a managed environment that provides:

• Administrative control over subscriptions
• A locked down RSS reader that works in Microsoft Outlook
• Reporting and analytics that provide insights into the feeds being read and tagged

Number 1: Simplehelp Attensa for Outlook Overview

Ross at Simplehelp has put together a quick-start for getting up and running with Attensa for Outlook. He starts out by saying:

"Attensa integrates itself into Outlook so well that you're not even aware it's there most of the time. You can switch back and forth between reading email and RSS feeds so easily you'll wonder why you used to use a browser or separate app for RSS. And best of all, it's free."

Number 2: New version of our Getting Started with Attensa for Outlook for Version 2.0

We just put the new version of our getting started guide for Attensa for Outlook on the Attensa website. The 42 page guide has been updated to include all of the new features in 2.0 including:

Integrating Attensa for Outlook with the Attensa Feed Server.

Listening to audio and watching videos in the River of News

Setting up desktop alerts

You can download the Getting Started with Attensa for Outlook guide here.

We announced the release of our current Attensa for Outlook version 2.0 a couple of days ago. Today we activated auto-update, so current users running versions lower than 2.0.1.29 will be prompted with the option to upgrade during the next 24 hours.

Here's the short list of improvements again:
1. Attensa now sends graphics to your blog service.
2. Improved category synchronization between the various Attensa components.
3. The River of News view now has icons to indicate whether an Attensa Feed Server feed is mandatory or not.
4. Improved playback in the River of News Pod Player.

Plus one more big one... the Firefox extension is now compatible with Firefox 2.0.

On Friday I gave the breakfast pitch at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. Here's a quick summary from Jason Preston on the Blog Business Summit site and here are the slides: Download file

"Scott Niesen, of Attensa, starts off the day with a presentation on the practical business applications of RSS, and RSS enterprise solutions. I've dropped my usual bullet-list of running thoughts below:

• The holy grail of marketing is getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
• The feed tools at Attensa, says Scott, are designed to use RSS feeds to get the right information to the right people instantaneously, without overloading them.
• There are stages of RSS in Business:

1. Blog posts and news headlines come in.
2. They start using them for business intelligence alerts.
3. Then they get circulated around with internal blogs and wikis.

• Then businesses get RSS-enabled enterprise systems to really harness RSS as a business tool. RSS readers allow you to access what is essentially an indispensable research tool, for example, monitoring RSS feeds from the blogosphere lets you do pretty intense brand monitoring, just by running a constant keyword search.
• Persistence & Subscription: RSS is an indispensable collaboration tool in its ability, in an internal blog for example, to make new developments available instantaneously of changes or updates. In short, a great way to track team projects.
• CEO blogging is a great way to build a shared vision - Attensa CEO keeps a private and a public blog, both of which help keep the company headed in the same direction.
• RSS connects to a ton of different data types that go beyond traditional blogs and wikis - they use RSS to deliver podcasts within the company.
• Sales force leads can be delivered to blackberries very conveniently with feeds. Good idea.
• RSS is a double-edged sword - old methods of getting information are not going away - so RSS is convenient, but it's also another possible way to get to information overload.
• The difficulty is creating a system whereby you get the news you want (or need) without getting overloaded with millions of feeds (anyone who uses an RSS reader knows how difficult this is).
• This is kind of cool: in the new Attensa reader, the feeds you look at most automatically rise to the top of your list. Kind of like the "most played" list in iTunes.
• When you're looking at enterprise RSS options, Scott has a list of 7 things to check, some of them:
  1. Is it easy to install & deploy?
  2. Access it anywhere? Offline, web & mobile?
  3. Synchronization - critical!
  4. LDAP integration and Exchange support (I don't know what that means...let me see if Wikipedia does...I'm guessing this one)
• Question: What's the smallest size company that this enterprise type solution is practical for? Scott says: well, a company of one can download the Attensa reader and get a lot of benefit about it. But for the more complex systems, they recommend you start around 100 employees."

In July I wrote about Tris Hussey's experience getting in RSS in Outlook 2007. He gave the beta of Outlook 2007 a try and came back to Outlook 2003 with X1 for search and Attensa for Outlook as his RSS reader. A day doesn't go by when we don't get asked about the differences between reading RSS in Outlook using Attensa versus the Outlook 2007 experience. The short answer is there's a huge difference. Here's the short list...

Attensa for Outlook has:

River of News with AttentionStream prioritization

Persistent search across 18 search engines

Outlook player for podcasts and video and automatic playlist support for iTunes and Windows Media Player

Built-in tagging with del.icio.us synchronization

Auto feed discovery with preview for Firefox and IE

Browse, preview and select from 2000 feeds without leaving Attensa in Outlook

Deep connectivity with the Attensa Feed Server and the Microsoft Common Feed Platform

Attensa for Outlook 2.0 is available now and it's free. You can download Attensa for Outlook  here.

We plan to support Outlook 2007 when it comes out of beta. Here's a detailed look at the differences between Attensa for Outlook 2.0 and Outlook 2007. 

Last week I attended the New New Internet Conference in McClean, Virginia. The conference featured TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee. Michael gave a hilarious and insightful overview of what separates the winners and losers in the Web 2.0 business arena. Andrew McAffee is credited with coining the term "Enterprise 2.0." If you are not reading his blog you should be. His whitepaper on Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration is essential reading.

Professor McAfee is a brilliant and engaging speaker who made me want to quit my job and go to Harvard (unlikely that they would have me). His talk included practical advice on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise by starting with collaboration tools. He also addressed the tension between structured systems and the open social network of Web 2.0 behind the firewall. A vice president of marketing I once worked for summarized this tension by saying, "Iron sharpens iron." It was his way of saying that the best decisions are reached and the greatest results occur when the strengths of two opposing forces are brought together for a common purpose. Forward thinking business and technology leaders who successfully integrate social networking tools with structured infrastructure will experience new heights of innovation.

To get to the New New Internet conference, I flew from the Forrester Technology Leadership Forum in Phoenix to Baltimore, expecting to arrive at midnight, giving me time to catch a few hours of sleep before setting up my demo station at 6:30 AM. Instead, because of a series of mechanical problems (a tear above the wing on the first plane and a leaking sink on the second, fixed with duct tape) I arrived in Baltimore at 3:00 AM, picked up my rental car and proceeded to drive around for two hours before finding my hotel. Was I lost? No, just bewildered. I talked the hotel manager down from a $300 room rate to $119. Took a $119 shower, shaved, suited up and headed to conference. I guess I'm gung ho for enterprise 2.0.

At 7:15 AM I demonstrated Attensa for Outlook and the Attensa Feed Server to a panel of judges including Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Venture Partners , Phil Bronner of Novak Biddle, Charles Curran of Valhalla Partners, Karl Khoury of Columbia Partners and Tom Weithman of the Center for Innovative Technology.

Attensa was deemed to worthy of the title "Technology Pace Setter."

Here's what they had to say about us:
"Attensa - a world class RSS reader that solves the problem of synchronizing your feeds among multiple platforms, and also has shared intelligence technology, so that "group wisdom" can be applied to news feeds over an enterprise. You should check this application out I particularly liked the idea that within an enterprise a user could get a sense of which feeds were drawing the most attention."

On Wednesday we quietly refreshed our website and posted Attensa for Outlook 2.0. You can download the new version of Attensa for Outlook here. It's free.

We thought we'd come out of the 1.5 beta on roll so we jumped right to 2.0.

Unconventional? Perhaps. Decide for yourself. Here's our reasoning for the version leap.

Tens of thousands of enterprise business users have put Attensa for Outlook 1.5 to the test. This new version is built on top of the 1.5 code that has been enterprise hardened and meets the requirements of the most demanding IT pros for an RSS reader that means business.

Here's their short list - rock solid stability and minimal memory impact on Outlook performance, ease of deployment, advanced compatibility with the Microsoft RSS Platform, seamless synchronization and a feature set that covers the spectrum of use cases from reputation monitoring and management, gathering competitive intelligence, keeping up to speed on project collaboration, staying on top of rapidly critical corporate data, all without leaving Outlook.

What's new in 2.0

Deep connectivity with the Attensa Feed Server for seamless synchronization across Attensa for Outlook, the Attensa AJAX web reader and mobile devices and more meaningful attention analytics and reporting.

A mini player that lets users listen and watch audio and video content in Outlook, directly in the River of News. As more businesses take advantage of on demand video and audio to create and deliver specialized information, Attensa for Outlook let you choose how you want to consume rich media content. You can get instant access to the content using the new River of News player. Or, you can access the content when it is most convenient using the Attensa for Outlook Pod Catcher. The Pod Catcher automatically downloads audio and video attachments and puts them in a clearly labeled playlist in Windows Media Player or iTunes.

A desktop alert toaster keeps lets you track fast breaking business information whether you are working in Outlook or not. This Desktop Alert is smart. You can pick the feeds you want to be alerted to as soon as new information is available. When multiple feeds are updated, the alert box works the way you want it to work. It groups your alert notices so you can see at a glance when new information is available without being driven to distraction with constant interruptions.

Oh...and it's free. Did we mention that? We have made the move to a free download coupled with a premium support model. Premium support is $24.95 a year and gives you guaranteed response time to your issue and priority treatment. If you have purchased a previous version of Attensa for Outlook you are instantly covered with premium support.