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.

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."

Sales professionals can now track Salesforce.com leads, opportunities, activities, contacts, documents, and support cases in Outlook using Attensa for Outlook and Spanning Salesforce from Charlie Wood's Spanning Partners.

With Spanning Salesforce you can subscribe to personalized, secure RSS feeds to stay on top of their most important CRM information without logging into Salesforce.

Spanning Salesforce is available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Now Attensa for Outlook syncs with your mobile phone or PDA.

The new version of Attensa for Outlook is designed for business users on the move and provides easy to use, secure tools that help you track and monitor constantly changing business information without having to search or request it.

It's easy to get started with Attensa Mobile and the  new version of Attensa for Outlook

Step 1 - Open an Attensa Online account

Step 2 - Sign into Attensa mobile using your web browser on your mobile phone. Just type http://mobile.attensa.com into your mobile phone's web browser

Step 3 - You can add or remove feeds with either the Attensa Toolbar or Attensa for Outlook. 

Step 4 - Start reading your feeds on your phone. To save time and cut through information overload, Attensa Mobile only displays feeds with unread articles.

You can download the new version of Attensa for Outlook here. If you own Attensa for Outlook it will automatically update to the new version. Here's a rundown on what you can do with Attensa for Outlook 1.2.

• Access feeds anywhere - in Outlook, Online and on Mobile Devices
• Safe and Secure Subscriptions to Internal and External RSS feeds
• Easy to Use & Easy to Read
• Publish to Blogs and Forward Articles as Easily as Sending and Email
• Easy to Configure
• Powerful automated search tools
• Create, Import and Export Custom Reading Lists
• Update and Delete Articles on a Defined Schedule
• Keep Feeds and Articles Organized with Tagging and Categories
• Easy to Support
• Create custom style sheets that match corporate brand standards.

With the introduction of version 1.2 we are raising the price for Attensa for Outlook to $30.00 but we are extending the $20.00 price to the Attensa community for a limited time.

Go here to purchase Attensa for Outlook and use the promo-code - mobilerules