Attensa has a straightforward mission: To get the right information to the right people at the right time. Although Attensa's goal may not be entirely original, Eric Hayes -- who co-founded the company in 2005 -- believes his company can get it right on all three counts.

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.

Enterprise RSS readers, such as Attensa Feed Server and Attensa for Outlook, also help tune and prioritize feed streams. Much like TiVo’s user-controlled program weightings and suggestions, Attensa prioritizes internal and external data based on user behavior, monitoring activities such as feed selections and time spent reading a feed, as well as articles tagged, deleted, and forwarded. Weighted rankings then push key data to the top of your workgroup’s display stack.

The predominant use of RSS for knowledge workers will be related to process in my opinion. Getting notification that an order has been received, an invoice needs approval, or that parties have reached agreement on a contract is more important than an RSS feed of a persistent search using Google or Technorati for the company’s ticker symbol. As valuable as it might be to follow news stories about a company, it doesn’t necessarily improve their business processes and thus doesn’t really matter to the knowledge worker.

Attensa gets this. And they understand the value of tracking “attention data,” a fancy term indicating that a user’s behavior in reference to feeds is tracked for purposes of reporting. What feeds users pay attention to can translate into “which projects are getting attention from a particular group of users.” But extend this concept one step further by considering that a report can be generated based upon the attention stream of a given set of users to see metrics on ALL the systems that have RSS output. One could essentially make correlations between systems that are otherwise not integrated by using the attention data. That’s a difficult, if not impossible, metric to track when email is the messaging medium.

Keeping up with your competitors, your industry, and the media's coverage of your company is becoming an increasingly daunting task. Many of the same companies that provide the web publishing tools for creating feeds also provide businesses with tools for filtering through RSS feeds.

When you factor in podcasts and video content, the sheer volume of data online is growing at a faster rate than ever. Cutting through the thousands of blogs that are personal in nature to find the content that affects your marketing efforts requires smart RSS tools.

Attensa recently released a free RSS reader tool that plugs into Outlook. Attensa analyzes the feeds and items that you read and automatically ranks the items to bring the most relevant data to the top. For workgroups, this can eliminate countless browsing hours by making sure that the urgent information gets to the entire group instead of relying on "did you see this" emails or IMs between co-workers.

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."

The folks at Attensa make a slick RSS aggregator that integrates with Outlook and provides a River of News-style view with priortization based on what feeds you use the most.

Not too long ago, they released version 2.0 of the Attensa for Outlook product. Along with a ton of other great features, it includes synchronization with the Windows RSS Platform, so when you hit that RSS button in IE, the feed can automatically show up in Attensa -- which is great if you're using Attensa as your primary RSS reader.

This has been one of our guiding principles in IE7 -- you don't have to read your feeds in IE. By using the open APIs of the RSS platform, developers of innovative new RSS readers like Attensa can gain access to the orange button in IE7 that Steve Rubel loves.

Attensa works with Outlook 2000, Outlook XP and 2003 (Outlook 2007 support is in the works). If you're an Outlook user, you should definitely check it out. It's free -- so it's an easy choice if you're looking to try out something new.

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.

Attensa, a Portland-based company, has continued to improve upon its enterprise RSS feed reader solution which I highlighted previously, by releasing Attensa 2.0. Attensa believes that an Outlook integrated feed reader is a core requirement for large corporations.

Attensa 2.0 offers all of the same features of the previous 1.5 version including the ability to leverage "attention" click stream data to fight information overload as the most influential information is bubbled to the top. Attensa 2.0 offers the ability to set desktop alerts to deliver server alerts, out of inventory updates, pricing changes or other specify needs. Attensa responded to feedback from its Attensa 1.5 corporate integrations and now offers audio and video podcasts inline. Inline audio and video enabled corporations to easily enable podcasts for corporate training and other internal uses as enclosures do not send users to external sites or intranets sites for playback. The screen-shot to the left shows an audio file being played inline.

Attensa 2.0 is being offered with forum support and a PDF user guide for free! Additional support and access to the Attensa knowledge base can be purchased for $24.95 per year per client.

TechCrunch: Attensa 2.0 Reads Feeds and Multimedia in Outlook for Free

Enterprise RSS and Attention company has moved to a strategy to sell customer support subscriptions and seed organizations with their product until a critical mass is met to offer their Enterprise Feed Server. I think that's a very good idea.

The basic premise of Attensa is that it's a feed reader that tracks users' reading habits and adjusts its display to offer the most important feeds at the right time for each reader. The Feed Server product allows businesses to manage a large number of desktop clients with varying default feeds and permission levels behind a firewall.

Other changes that have been made in the 2.0 release include the ability to play audio and video files inside Outlook, a desktop toast alert tool for high priority items and a number of stability and deployment improvements.

Attensa has now rolled out its product in a number of high profile enterprise contexts and says that the 2.0 product is far more battle tested than previous releases. They've got quite a few interesting projects in the works that I hope I'll be able to post on here at a later date.

The company has received $12 million in two rounds of funding, from Portland's Smart Forrest Ventures and Cambridge, Mass. based RSS Investors.

Start-up Attensa has developed a Microsoft Outlook RSS reader with a twist: it analyzes patterns in RSS feeds to see how information inside companies is being consumed.

The company next Tuesday will launch Attensa for Outlook 2.0, an upgrade to its reader designed to run in large-scale deployments, said Scott Niesen, Attensa's director of marketing, speaking at the New New Internet conference.

The reader puts individual RSS feeds into Outlook folders and allows people to get different views on incoming feeds. It plays podcasts from within Outlook. Attensa also sells a Linux server for administering feeds and generating reports.

The software has "attention analytics" which prioritize feeds for individuals based on previous patterns. Business managers are interested in usage patterns as well, Niesen said.

Corporate customers eager to experiment with Web 2.0 technologies are using Attensa's software to analyze RSS-generated information, which could be anything from news feeds to updates on internal wikis, he said.

For example, reports analyzing tags and forwarded information could indicate that a handful of people are experts in a specific topic and serve as conduits of information to others.

In addition, the software can show the feeds which people or groups are reading.

"Companies are very interested in specific information channels," said Niesen. "The attention analytics can pinpoint what information is being consumed by whom."

RSS technology continues to move forward in the enterprise world, and if Attensa has its way their Feed Server technology will provide the guiding hand toward greater RSS utility and usage.

A savvy company that steps up today for the Feed Server will be running ahead of the curve in the business world. Used effectively, the beneficial information a quality site can provide rapidly over a feed can help competitiveness in the marketplace.

Enterprise RSS vendor Attensa has released two new products this summer and I was able to take a look at both last week. The company now offers Attensa for Outlook version 1.5 beta and an Attensa Feedserver. Attensa Online, a consumer product we've written about in the past, has been deprioritized in favor of an enterprise focus. Attensa was one of the 12 highlighted innovators at the TechCrunch sponsored session at SuperNova this summer.

While RSS for individual news reading is invaluable, leveraging it for organizational communication is undoubtedly going to become a common practice in the near future. 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.

Heinz Tschabitscher at About.com calls the newest version of Attensa for Outlook "an ingeniously powerful yet reasonably simple way to read RSS feeds in Outlook."

"The artificial intelligence is coming in the form of RSS Readers that will be capable of following what users pay attention to and then use that data to serve and recommend more relevant RSS content to them.

One of the first such services might come from Attensa who are focusing their RSS efforts especially on this field, and are actually betting on attention services being offered as background tools to run in the most popular RSS Readers, to thrive and flourish in the world of RSS Readers run by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!"

"Now that I've had a chance to see Attensa's solution in action (here at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco), I can understand why John Palfrey's RSS Investors venture capital outfit selected the company as one of its initial investments (valued at $9 million)."

"Attensa has just released version 0.99 of its free Outlook-based RSS reader. Along with a new look (bye bye to the Halloween color scheme) and a number of performance enhancements, the big news is the addition of del.icio.us tags:

'We've integrated an incredibly easy way to tag articles and feeds using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online.'

Incredibly cool idea." (full article)

"A RSS reader for Microsoft Outlook. Attensa for Outlook is one of the few RSS news reader and news aggregator to provide integration of RSS capability into Microsoft Outlook, that brings up-to-date news and content from website, blogs, and Podcast sites, directly into Microsoft Outlook."

"Attensa is a world class RSS reader that is attacking the multi-platform syncronization problem (I'll explain that) and is also looking very seriously at the attention issue from a unique perspective (a good thing).

Attensa launched their first product at Gnomedex in June - an Outlook based reader that is lightning fast and has been getting rave reviews (Jeff Nolan). It's also free, for now.