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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
Last week we released Attensa for Outlook 2.0.1.29. After using it for a week, I'm impressed with the small details. I know I work here and I'm supposed to like Attensa no matter what, but I really do love the way we're streamlining Attensa to keep up with the way I work. (My boss didn't make me write that.)
Here's what our team has put into this release:
1. More robust publishing. Attensa now sends graphics to your blog service.
2. They've cleaned up some issuse with how categories synchronize between the various Attensa parts... a big one for me is that Firefox has now forgotten my deleted categories, which used to hang around far too long.
3. The River of News view in Outlook continues to mature and integrate with our Attensa Feed Server, and now has icons to indicate whether a feed is mandatory or not.
4. The Outlook team has continues to tinker with the Pod Player, so playback has improved.
Since I remove and reinstall Attensa all the time, add and remove feeds for testing and in general do awful things to my computer in the interest of Science (like deleting data files while they're in use), I've noticed that this newest Attensa version recovers from the bad things I do, usually with just a simple restart of the Attensa Engine.
There's a lot to love about Attensa in the small details of how it works. It works the way I work.
I'm catching up with my feeds as the train parallels the Columbia River. Cormorants, herons and gulls sit on the wing dams and piling remnants from the days the timber industry flourished. The train is terrific.
Reading articles offline with Attensa for Outlook is one of the real benefits of a dedicated feed reader compared to relying on a browser based reader.
This got my attention. Rod Boothy at Innovation Creators hits it just right with his post - Participation is the killer app.
"Whether it is end user participation in content driven conversations on blogs and wikis, or end user developed applications, mash-ups and widgets, I think that it is participation that key difference between Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 1.0."
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.
Download fileLast 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.
Apparently the Attensa toolbars we introduced more than a year ago for tagging, identifying, previewing and subscribing to feeds and our tagging toolbar are pretty good ideas.
Newsgator just announced a beta of their toolbar today.
With the Attensa browser toolbar you can:
- identify all of the feeds available on a page
- preview the feed and articles to see if you want to subscribe
- subscribe with a click
- access all of your feeds and articles in your browser
- tag articles and synchronize with del.icio.us
Here's a duplicate of a post I wrote in December 2005 describing the wonders of the Attensa toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The Chiclet problem surfaces at the Syndicator Blog. The rash of badges is totally out of hand.
Attensa has another approach to finding feeds and easily subscribing from a Web page or blog from your browser.
We use a toolbar in IE or Firefox to identify feeds and to let you see what kinds of articles are available before deciding to subscribe. This eliminates the need to clutter a page with branded badges. On the one hand this may not be the brightest marketing move on Attensa's part... but it sure makes sense from a user's perspective.
Here's a screenshot of Attensa auto feed detection at work:
And here's the feed preview
Let us know what you think.
P.S. Thanks for letting us know it's a great idea, Newsgator.
Michael Arrington has created a phenomenon building his TechCrunch readership to 80 thousand in less than a year. Impressive.
Attensa's history with TechCrunch goes back to our launch last summer. Last Thursday we sat down with Marshall Kirkpatrick who recently joined the TechCrunch team. Marshall just moved to Portland and we were delighted connect and bring him up to date on our products and progress and talk about all things related to RSS, social networking, Web 2.0 business and where he should eat and drink now that he's here. We even offered to help him.
Marshall got right on it and posted on the Attensa Feed Server and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 on Saturday. We really liked this line..."Attensa's use of attention data in both its Attensa for Outlook and
Attensa Feedserver products is impressive now and the potential for the
future is really exciting. Just about any source of information can be
delivered by RSS and as the practice becomes more common we're going to
need more sophisticated ways to take advantage of the medium." You can read the rest of "Attensa Offers Two Rich Enterprise Products here."
We are frequently asked about the impact of Outlook 2007 on Attensa for Outlook. Tris Hussey shares his experience using Outlook 2007 here. Tris is the Director of Strategic Partner Relations and unofficial Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana software, a great blog editing tool that I'm using.
I'll spoil it for you by jumping to the punchline. Tris has gone back to Outlook 2003 but supercharging it with X1 desktop search and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 for feed reading.
Tris has been using the Attensa for Outlook 1.5 beta instead of FeedDemon for about a week and has this to say. "Attensa. I think they are on to something here...I think my feed scanning is getting better."
Michael Gotta of the Burton Group sums up the role of Web feeds and attention in addressing two of the major issues facing IT organizations and information workers.
"Providing users with the right information, at the right time, in the right context has been the holy grail for IT organizations. At the same time, users have been frustrated with either too much information, too little information, information that isn't timely and information that isn't relevant."
Attensa is announcing two new products that address these issues head-on.
For enterprises and IT organizations, Attensa is introducing the Attensa Feed Server, the first Enterprise Feed Server Appliance. The Attensa Feed Server is an appliance that can be easily installed behind the firewall and enables IT administrators to easily set up and manage feeds for groups and individuals enabling improved collaboration and knowledge sharing.
For knowledge workers, Attensa is announcing the public beta of a new version of Attensa for Outlook, the first RSS reader utilizing AttentionStream technology to automatically prioritize information based on the user's behavior history to automatically bring the most important RSS feeds and articles to the top.
You can read the news releases here:
Attensa Introduces First Enterprise Feed Server Appliance
Take a look at our new Web site update. You can find detailed Attensa Feed Server information here and you can download the beta of Attensa for Outlook 1.5 here.
Chris Garrett on Performancing says the new version of Attensa
for Outlook 1.5 with the river of news and AttentionStream predictive
ranking that automatically prioritizes your Web feeds based on their importance is "all smart and stuff."
You can try the beta free for 60 days. Active contributors to the beta program will get a free copy of the final product.
At Syndicate in New York we gave a preview of Attensa for Outlook 1.5, the first version of Attensa for
Outlook that uses our AttentionStream technology to automatically and
intelligently prioritize RSS feeds and articles and bring the subscriptions and
articles you find most interesting to the top. We said the public beta
would be announced in June. We were off by about two weeks.
We are opening the public beta today and we'd like to invite you to give Attensa for Outlook a try.
Download
the beta here.
You
can download a getting started with 1.5 guide here
You
can see screenshots here.
Attensa's
predictive ranking AttentionStream technology continuously observes and
analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process RSS articles.
By constantly analyzing AttentionStream data, including the time and
frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, RSS
articles can be displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that
they will be of interest to you. Feed priorities are constantly refined as the
continuous stream of attention is processed.
Subscriptions can be displayed in a "River of News" view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds you
subscribe to.
Articles can be read in order of importance based on:
Of course, you can also read their articles using a standard Outlook
view.
If
Outlook is the first application you open in the morning and the last one you close at
night, you need Attensa for Outlook, the RSS reader designed for business users
looking for an easy to use, secure RSS reader for Outlook that helps track and
monitor critical business information- automatically.
Once you experiment with Attensa for Outlook you'll probably have suggestions for features and improvements. We've
set up an Attensa for
Outlook 1.5 beta forum where you can post bug reports and provide
feedback.
Yesterday Craig Barnes, Attensa's CEO and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Root Markets, discussed their views on how applied attention technology works for users. The Attensa approach is to use AttentionStreams to continuously and automatically prioritize information so that the most useful information bubbles to the top, helping to control the flow of the RSS information firehose. The Root Market approach is let user track their clickstreams on the Web and to use and share their history in a marketspace that trades qualified sales leads for offers of value.
The Agile Buzz has the play by play here.
And David Utter at WebProNews raises a valid question on the privacy concerns tied to an Attention based marketplace.
For the first time since we introduced Attensa nearly one year ago we are delivering on the promise of less is more. At Syndicate we are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 which displays feeds and articles in the order you want to read them.
Attensa for Outlook 1.5 uses a
Version 1.5 uses our predictive ranking AttentionStream
technology. By continuously analyzing implicit and explicit AttentionStream
data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles
read, deleted and ignored, RSS articles can be displayed in a prioritized list
based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader at another
time.
Feed priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of
attention is processed.Articles can be
read in order of predictive ranking, sorted by date or customized by the user. This
new version of Attensa for Outlook gives users the control to manually rank
feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of
their subscription lists.
Attensa for Outlook 1.5 synchronizes with the new
Microsoft RSS Platform. By leveraging the Microsoft Common Feed Store, RSS
feeds added using Attensa for Outlook, Internet Explorer 7 or Windows Vista,
will automatically be synchronized for a seamless user experience.
You can see for yourself in June.
We are in New York
at the Syndicate Conference. With its focus on RSS and publishing, Syndicate is one of our
favorite shows. It also allows us to catch up with a lot of folk we don't see
nearly often enough.
We
are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 which showcases our first use of
AttentionStream technology. We are excited for its potential, and judging by
the reaction at PC Magazine when we demoed it to them yesterday, they are too.
Speaking of upcoming news, we thought we would let you know where we plan on being for the next couple of months in case you will be at any of these conferences and would like to get together. Don't be shy about saying hi and stopping in for a conversation.
You can find our event schedule here.
Syndicate New York: May 16 -17
Attensa
President and CEO, Craig Barnes is on a panel with Seth Goldstein of Root
Markets discussing - "Selling Attention: Two
Differing Views"
05/17/2006, 1:30 PM - 2:25 PM
Attensa
will be sponsoring the SixApart
Business Blogging Seminars being held:
New York - May 25, 2006
Los Angeles - June 22, 2006
Red Herring "Pursuit of Disruption" Conference -
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.
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
David
Berlind asks if "more is actually less" when it comes to the horsepower
corporate PCs will need to run Vista.
And
Gartner advises that about half of corporate PCs aren't equipped to run all the
features of Windows Vista, and companies should gradually deploy the upcoming
operating system on new computers, rather than take the more costly alternative
of upgrading older ones.
Gartner
advises companies to replace notebooks every three years and desktops every four
years. Given that most companies will take at least 18 months from the time Vista ships for planning and testing, by the time they're
ready to deploy it, the useful life left on 2006 PCs would be about 17% on
laptops and 37.5% on notebooks. With
Attensa for Outlook companies can take advantage of the RSS features promised
in Vista and Outlook 12 today without the expense of upgrading hardware to support Vista.
The Spring issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review has a terrific overview of how blogs, wikis and group messaging software are defining Enterprise 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.
The author, Andrew P McAfee, an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, coins a new acronym -- SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals) to describe the tools and communication patterns that are essential to building highly collaborative environments that can drive productivity to new levels.
You can buy a copy of the report here.
Attensa for Outlook includes the features that top the must-list for business class RSS readers necessary to track and monitor the signals
With
Charlie Wood's Spanning Salesforce sales
professionals can subscribe to personalized, secure RSS feeds and keep on
top of theri most important information-including leads, opportunities,
contacts, activities, and documents-on your PC, Mac, or mobile device.
Here's the Salesforce.com AppExchange listing and Charlie gives a
great introduction to how
it all works here.
You need an RSS reader that supports
secure feeds. For Outlook users Spanning Partners recommends Attensa for
Outlook 1.1 (thanks Charlie) Spanning Salesforce lets you track your new and
updated information in Salesforce.com using RSS using RSS. And since Spanning
Salesforce doesn't require adminsistrative privleges, any individual can sign
up.
When information
is added or changed in your Salesforce.com account, you'll see it reflected in
your Spanning Salesforce feeds. If a new lead is assigned to you, you'll see it
in the My Unread Leads feed. As leads become opportunities, you'll be able to
track changes in your pipeline. If you're responsible for customer support,
you'll be notified of case and escalation assignments.
Plus, as new documents are
uploaded you'll get not only a notification but also the ability to download
any new document with one click. In fact, with your RSS reader properly
configured, new documents will be automatically downloaded as they become
available.
Given the opportunity, people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally. It's the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there's plenty of that.
Saved bookmarks chart the current and historical levels of interest in what their URLs represent, and they identify grou