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.

Andrew McAfee gave Enterprise 2.0 a report card at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference yesterday.

A - awareness of the concept
A- - Technologies
C - Communication of the results

And the professor has given us homework. He called on the industry to do a better job sharing best practices, applications and case studies. The Enterprise 2.0 Uncoalition might be just the forum to share the love.

In that spirit here's a start. We put this together for an enterprise customer who is using the Attensa Feed Server to improve corporate communications across their organization. I've blogged about this earlier in a series but here's the complete document.

Download Attensa's Feed Reading Best Practices

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. 

They say second place is just an award to make losers feel better. In this case we couldn't disagree more. SEOMOZ.org has deemed Attensa for Outlook worthy of a 2007 Web 2.0 Award and we're tickled pink. First place goes to FeedBurner and who can argue with that?

Attensa for Outlook earned:

5 out of 5 stars for usefulness

4 out of 5 stars for usability, interface design and social aspects

An now you don't have to be exclusively an Outlook user to get in this goodness. When you download Attensa for Outlook you also get a stand alone Windows desktop reader that gives you the same feature set outside of Outlook.

GiddyUp! Download Attensa for Outlook. It's free.

 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."

Jeremy Wagstaff is writing about Attention in his Loose Wire column in the Wall Street Journal and he's mentions Attensa in his Loose Wire blog.

We couldn't agree more with his take away. "This is just the beginning. Further down the track, tools like Particls (and Attensa - my edit) will feed into our attention streams to find out what we're paying attention to and use that information to further hone their grasp of what we want to know. Expect them to continue the march of personalizing not just your hunt for information but the way it's delivered to you -- when, where and how."

Attensa's first step is the automatic prioritization of articles based on your reading behaviors. Location is playing a role with the ability to channel specific feeds to specific access points (the Web, the desktop, your smartphone and instant messaging)so the information you want (and just the information you want) shows up where you want it.

When you boil it all down,attention is really about using technology and tools to pull the information we want toward us when we want it and to push things that aren't important away so we can concentrate on the task at hand and stay in the flow.

Our dev team has been working on article level prioritization since we launched Attensa and we'll be previewing the stellar results of their efforts at ETech. The Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2 is the first attention driven RSS reader that prioritizes articles (not just feeds) based on an individual's reading habits. This is a major step forward in our AttentionStream technology development.

You can read the news release here.

You'll be able to try it out for yourself (for free of course) on April 10th when we post Attensa for Outlook 2.5 Beta 2.

The new version integrates an AttentionStream® Learning Engine that automatically pulls articles that are most important to you to the top of the River of News. Stars indicate the estimated relevance based on your reading habits.

Attensa’s unique AttentionStream Learning Engine observes and learns from the user’s feed and article reading behaviors and works on the principle that past and present actions predict future behavior. Deep analytics of article content are matched to a personalization system that automatically prioritizes and recommends new articles that will be of interest to the reader.

The new approach matches content cues with personas (readers and deleters, skimmers, active readers and more) and matches their content choices and behaviors to rank the articles. The goal is to deliver a powerful, personalized, attention-driven reading experience.

This is much more than the popularity contest social networking sites use to suggest content. That can be interesting, at best, but when it comes to quickly getting up to speed as part of a work flow, frankly I'm more interested in cutting through to what I'm interested in.

There's more The 2.5 Beta 2 is a bottleneck breaker that significantly improves the RSS handling performance of Outlook 2007 (it also works with XP and Outlook 2003). The new version gives you two options for channeling articles into Outlook. User can stores their articles in a separate file or they can bypass Outlook’s storage completely by pulling articles on demand into the Attensa for Outlook River of News. Both methods speed up Outlook performance significantly and cut PST file bloat which drags down Outlook performance.

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.

 Rod does it again. Here's a solid introduction on putting internal blogs to work.. With our RSS reader integration with Outlook and our development work on Notes and Sametime, why not have the feeds come to you instead of using a web based reader?

"Are you a CEO? Do you want you people to across silos? Do you want your engineers or your designers to know exactly what the sales people are asking them? Or better yet, do you want everyone in your company to have a deep understand of what your clients actually want, need and will pay money for?

Do you want your people to be personally motivated?

Has anything in your company taken off half as aggressively as blogs and social media have taken off in the open Internet?

Now I have a simple question for you. Do you know how to use blogs within your organization to help you get work done? There are plenty of blogs out there that can tell you how to use blogs as a PR and marketing tool to communicate with your clients. But, when people actually think about getting work done within the organization, not a lot has been written.

This post aims to tell you exactly what you need to do to use blogs efficiently within your organization.

Activity Centric Worksites

First, you do not need to buy a multi-million dollar system to get the benefits of Activity Centric Worksites. You can use a regular blogging platform, such as WordPress or MovableType. You will need to hire some consultants to make those consumer systems do the job for you. Total set up cost, in my experience, is $50K to $100K. Or you can spend about the same amount with a pre-built enterprise class system from companies like iUpload, Blogtronix or Traction Software.

The idea behind Activity Centric Worksites is to use blogging tools to facilitate focused business communication. Instead of using a blog as a tool for one person to broadcast their thoughts on “whatever”, use blogs as a platform to help people within your company communicate about what they are doing for work. To make it easy to frame the conversation, provide structure around simple concepts that make sense for your company.

If you are running a consulting company, you might have following Worksite types:
• Project Worksites - these are used to exchange information about a specific project
• Client Worksites - these are used to talk about a specific client
• People Worksites - these are like internal resumes that show who is working on what
• Practice Worksites - these are used to communicate amongst a whole team
• Focus Worksites - the only thing that resembles a consumer blog, these are written by a small group and are like internal e-journals dedicated to specific technical topics

Finding the Right Set of Worksite templates

Depending on what your company does, you are going to need a different list of Worksite templates. Ask yourself what do we talk about here? If you are a software company, you might have whole worksites dedicated to specific modules in the new release of your product. Instead of Practice Worksites, you might have a Release Worksite that coordinates information about each module within the release.

If you are a bank, you might have Clients, Products, Market Overviews, Projects, and People.

Start with Search

Most internet experiences start with someone going to Yahoo, Google, MSN or Baidu. They are all search sites. If you want your people to be productive, your main internal home page shouldn't be some waste of time portal. It should look like Google, and it should help people find the information they need.

Your People will Need Wizards to Help Create New Worksites

A Worksite is more than just a blog theme. For example, a Project Worksite should include a list of the people working on the project with links back to each person's People Worksite. The Project Worksite should probably also include a link to the Client Worksite.

To create a copy of a blank Project Worksite, you need to create a simple wizard that walks your employees through the process of creating a new site. You also need a system that has CMS capabilities which help deal with access control, user authentication, backup, audit trails of who read what, and given admin tools to support the re purposing of posts - write once, publish in many places.

Many to Many Communication

There are very few software systems out there that can even define the notion of a Worksite type, let alone give you the frame work to automate the creation of a new one. The only systems I know of today that can do this are iUpload, Blogtronix and Traction Software.

IBM's Lotus Notes does not have "straight out of the box" support for Activity Centric Blogs - although they do have their own Activity Centric Computing notion. In Hannover, your email inbox is organized into folders that are called activities.

In mid 2006, IBM Lotus CTO Doug Wilson said

Right now, the ‘glue’ that associates tasks and objects within an activity remains in the users’ heads. But if we’re able to create and save the thread of an activity, we should also be able to preserve it as a pattern that others can reuse when performing the same or similar activities."

In Nov of 2006, Domino Blogsphere V3 said

Currently in very early development stages is a new application that doesn't have an official name yet but it is basically a Blog Manager.

I am currently unaware of any other system that can support true enterprise class blogging that could support "Worksites". Microsoft's Sharepoint does not have this functionality.

The issue is one of creating a platform that supports many to many communication, as opposed to most consumer blogging tools, which were originally designed to support one to many communication. There are tools out there that support multiple people authoring one blog, but that isn't the issue here.

For example, in a Big 4 consulting firm of 100,000, you could easily end up with a huge number of blogs:

100,000 People Worksites
400,000 Project Worksites per year
100,000 Client Worksites
5,000 Practice Worksites
5,000 Focus Worksites

Examples

Here are some screenshot examples of what these things could look like. When I created these, I simply called them "Pages" instead of "Worksites". I term "pages" is confusing, because it makes people think they are looking at one page, not a whole site about a specific work topic.

Why not use a Wiki?

Wikis are a useful tool for collaborating on a document. They become less useful when they are used to communicate about events. For example, Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia. But, when you think about daily events such as updates on the relationship with a client, or the latest events in a project, blogs already have the built in notion of time stamped posts that communicate that information.

This is not to say that a company should never use wikis. Instead, there is a time and place for both wikis and blogs within the Enterprise.

Motivation through Recognition

To get people to contribute, you have to give them a personal reason to use a new system like this. One way is to make sure that people get credit for the good work they do.

Other tips and Tricks

• Email Integration - Transition in to using the system by making sure that your Worksite system supports an email address for every blog / Worksite. That way, people can just cc the blog instead of CC'ing to CYA. This also gives people an easy way to start to use a big system.
• Dos and Don'ts - People will recognize that the new system is a powerful reputation management system. Some will be worried that it could damage their reputation as much as help them. Give them some guidance with a firm set of dos and don'ts/
• Screencasts - The success of YouTube has proven that people LOVE videos. Use videos and screencasts to teach your employees about the new system and get them excited to use it.
• Use Weekly Email Updates - Blogs do not replace email. They only simply an additional communication tool. To get people excited about a new system, and to make sure they learn how it is being used and where it is succeeding, send out weekly update emails to your user base. Some people will take a long time to switch over to the new system. Weekly emails will keep them in the loop.
• Forget Dashboard - Use an RSS Reader - If you are a senior executive responsible for a whole cascade of projects, use a tool like Netvibes to monitor each of those projects. Skim the headlines. Click on the posts that seem to need your attention.
• Enterprise Digg - Cogenz is an example of a tool that you can use to help your people let each other know about interesting ideas.
• Folksonomy - Order Emerges from Chaos. And people will standardize on what keywords and tags to use to describe their articles. While it is important to give some structure, such as defining Worksite types, it is not necessary to dictate everything.

Source: How to use Blogs in the Workplace
by Rod Boothby

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

My river of news was flowing this morning. This post on Dion Hinchcliffes' Enterprise 2.0 blog is one of the best I've seen on the subject.

Dion ties together the updated definition of Web 2.0 included in a new report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices with his own view of how Web 2.0 technologies apply to workers using network software within their organization.

He includes a reminder of the ground breaking work Andrew McAfee has done in providing a framework for bringing the best of Web 2.0 tools to work - SLATES.

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

"SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for p